Option for bypassing some ribbons?

[adeldaoud]

Hi

Thanks for a great package, first of all.

I wonder if it is possible for some ribbons to “by-pass” some categories along the way (from left to right)? For example, the networkD3 package has this functionality (https://christophergandrud.github.io/networkD3/), see specifically the sankeyNetwork example with the Energy example (code copied into here).

library(networkD3)
# Load energy projection data
URL <- paste0(
        "https://cdn.rawgit.com/christophergandrud/networkD3/",
        "master/JSONdata/energy.json")
Energy <- jsonlite::fromJSON(URL)
# Plot
sankeyNetwork(Links = Energy$links, Nodes = Energy$nodes, Source = "source",
             Target = "target", Value = "value", NodeID = "name",
             units = "TWh", fontSize = 12, nodeWidth = 30)

Notice, for instance, how the “Oil import” category flows via the “Oil” category, but by-passes the “Thermal generation” category. Is this possible to achieve with the alluvial package?

[mbojan]

Hi, thanks.

The short answer is no, you can't do that with alluvial. The short answer to "why?" is

• The purpose of alluvial is to generalize parallel axis plot to categorical variables.
• Sankey diagrams are used to visualize data that can be represented as a weighted graph. alluvial needs richer data than that.

If "networkD3" does not fill your bill you may try "riverplot" from https://logfc.wordpress.com/2014/02/27/riverplot/