Circular chart with several tracks



The circlize package allows to build circular charts with several tracks. This post describes how, providing explanation and reproducible code..

Chord section Data to Viz

If you read the graph #224, and #225 you know how to make circular plots and customize them.

It is possible to add several tracks on your circular plot: just repeat the step 2 (building regions with circos.trackPlotRegion) and 3 (adding dots with circos.trackPoints for instance).

Note that you can custom the width of each track using track.height.

#library
library(circlize)
circos.clear()

#Create data
data = data.frame(
    factor = sample(letters[1:8], 1000, replace = TRUE),
    x = rnorm(1000), 
    y = runif(1000)
    )
 
#Initialize the plot.
par(mar = c(1, 1, 1, 1) ) 
circos.initialize(factors = data$factor, x = data$x )
 

# Build the regions of track #1 
circos.trackPlotRegion(factors = data$factor, y=data$y, panel.fun = function(x, y) {
    circos.axis(labels.cex=0.5, labels.font=1, lwd=0.8)
    })
# --> Add a scatterplot on it:
circos.trackPoints(data$factor, data$x, data$y, col = rgb(0.1,0.5,0.8,0.3), pch=20)
 
 
# Build the regions of track #2:
circlize::circos.trackPlotRegion(factors = data$factor, y=data$y, panel.fun = function(x, y) {
    circos.axis(labels=FALSE, major.tick=FALSE)
    })
# --> Add a scatterplot on it
circos.trackPoints(data$factor, data$x, data$y, col = rgb(0.9,0.5,0.8,0.3), pch=20, cex=2)
 
 
# Add track #3 --> don't forget you can custom the height of tracks!
circos.par("track.height" = 0.4)
circos.trackPlotRegion(factors = data$factor, y=data$y, panel.fun = function(x, y) {
    circos.axis(labels=FALSE, major.tick=FALSE)
    })
circos.trackLines(data$factor, data$x, data$y, col = rgb(0.9,0.5,0.1,0.3), pch=20, cex=2, type="h")
# and continue as long as needed!

Related chart types


Chord diagram
Network
Sankey
Arc diagram
Edge bundling



Contact

This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message on Twitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

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