Basic circle packing with one level



This page aims to describe how to build a basic circle packing chart with only one level of hierarchy. It uses the packcircle package for circle position, and ggplot2 for drawing.

Circle Packing section Data to Viz

This page aims to describe how to build a basic circle packing chart with only one level of hierarchy. Basically, you just represent each entity or individual of your dataset with a circle, its size depending on a provided value.

It is like a barplot, but you use circle size instead of bar length. It is close to a bubble plot, but X and Y positions do not mean anything. It is a circle version of a treemap.

Calculating the arrangement of dots is not a trivial problem. The packcircles library solves it and output coordinates of every points of the circle edges.

Finally, ggplot2 allows to draw shapes thanks to geom_polygon().

# Libraries
library(packcircles)
library(ggplot2)
 
# Create data
data <- data.frame(group=paste("Group", letters[1:20]), value=sample(seq(1,100),20)) 
 
# Generate the layout. This function return a dataframe with one line per bubble. 
# It gives its center (x and y) and its radius, proportional of the value
packing <- circleProgressiveLayout(data$value, sizetype='area')
 
# We can add these packing information to the initial data frame
data <- cbind(data, packing)
 
# Check that radius is proportional to value. We don't want a linear relationship, since it is the AREA that must be proportionnal to the value
# plot(data$radius, data$value)
 
# The next step is to go from one center + a radius to the coordinates of a circle that
# is drawn by a multitude of straight lines.
dat.gg <- circleLayoutVertices(packing, npoints=50)
 
# Make the plot
ggplot() + 
  
  # Make the bubbles
  geom_polygon(data = dat.gg, aes(x, y, group = id, fill=as.factor(id)), colour = "black", alpha = 0.6) +
  
  # Add text in the center of each bubble + control its size
  geom_text(data = data, aes(x, y, size=value, label = group)) +
  scale_size_continuous(range = c(1,4)) +
  
  # General theme:
  theme_void() + 
  theme(legend.position="none") +
  coord_equal()

Related chart types


Scatter
Heatmap
Correlogram
Bubble
Connected scatter
Density 2d



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