Circular Packing





Circular packing or circular treemap allows to visualize a hierarchic organization. It is an equivalent of a treemap or a dendrogram, where each node of the tree is represented as a circle and its sub-nodes are represented as circles inside of it.

One level → packcircles and ggplot2

If your dataset has no hierarchy (it is basically just a few entities with attributed numeric values), the packcircles package is the best way to build a circular packing chart in R. The packages basically computes the position of each bubble, allowing to build the chart with ggplot2.

The ggiraph library allows to get an interactive circular packing with 1 level of hierarchy. This is really handy: hover the plot and you will get more information concerning each circle.

How to export to .png Chart code

Several levels → ggraph

If your dataset is a hierarchy, it is time to switch to other tools. For static versions, the ggraph package is the best option. It follows the grammar of graphic and makes it a breeze to customize the appearance following the same logic than ggplot2.

The circlepackeR library allows to get an interactive circular packing with several levels of hierarchy. Click on a group to zoom on it. The post describes how to use the package from different types of input dataset.

How to export to .png Chart code

Related chart types


Grouped and Stacked barplot
Treemap
Doughnut
Pie chart
Dendrogram
Circular packing