Introduction to the circlize package



This post is an introduction to the circlize package: the ultimate way to build circular charts with R. It shows how to initialize a circular section and fill it with a scatterplot.

Chord section Data to Viz

In R, circular plots are made using the circlize package. Circular plots are composed by several regions (8 here), each representing a level of a factor. Three steps are required to build a circular plot:

  • Step 1: Initialize the chart with circos.initialize(). Provide the factor vector, and the numeric values to use for the X axis. The circle will be split in as many zone as the number of levels present in your factor. Each region will be as long as the coresponding x axis.

  • Step2: Build the regions with circos.trackPlotRegion(). You have to specify the factors once again, and tell what to use for the Y axis if needed.

  • Step3: Add a chart in each region. Here circos.trackPoints() is used to build a scatterplot. See chart #226 for other chart types.

# Upload library
library(circlize)
 
# Create data
data = data.frame(
    factor = sample(letters[1:8], 1000, replace = TRUE),
    x = rnorm(1000), 
    y = runif(1000)
    )
 
# Step1: Initialise the chart giving factor and x-axis.
circos.initialize( factors=data$factor, x=data$x )
 
# Step 2: Build the regions. 
circos.trackPlotRegion(factors = data$factor, y = data$y, panel.fun = function(x, y) {
    circos.axis()
    })
 
# Step 3: Add points
circos.trackPoints(data$factor, data$x, data$y, col = "blue", pch = 16, cex = 0.5) 

Related chart types


Chord diagram
Network
Sankey
Arc diagram
Edge bundling



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