R package for drawing alluvial diagrams

What are alluvial diagrams? See for example:

• Wikipedia
• My blog post showing-off this package
• Some discussion on CrossValidated

This package use base R graphics (R Core Team 2021) package. For Grammar of Graphics implementation see ggalluvial (Brunson and Read 2020; Brunson 2020).

Examples

Alluvial diagram of datasets::Titanic data made with alluvial(). Notice how each category block becomes a stacked barchart showing relative frequency of survivors.

tit <- tibble::as_tibble(Titanic)

tit %>% head() %>% knitr::kable()

Class	Sex	Age	Survived	n
1st	Male	Child	No	0
2nd	Male	Child	No	0
3rd	Male	Child	No	35
Crew	Male	Child	No	0
1st	Female	Child	No	0
2nd	Female	Child	No	0

alluvial(
    select(tit, Survived, Sex, Age, Class),
    freq=tit$n,
    col = ifelse(tit$Survived == "Yes", "orange", "grey"),
    border = ifelse(tit$Survived == "Yes", "orange", "grey"),
    layer = tit$Survived != "Yes",
    alpha = 0.8,
    blocks=FALSE
  )

Alluvial diagram for multiple time series / cross-sectional data based on alluvial::Refugees data made with alluvial_ts().

Refugees %>% head() %>% knitr::kable()

country	year	refugees
Afghanistan	2003	2136043
Burundi	2003	531637
Congo DRC	2003	453465
Iraq	2003	368580
Myanmar	2003	151384
Palestine	2003	350568

set.seed(39) # for nice colours
cols <- hsv(h = sample(1:10/10), s = sample(3:12)/15, v = sample(3:12)/15)

alluvial_ts(Refugees, wave = .3, ygap = 5, col = cols, plotdir = 'centred', alpha=.9,
            grid = TRUE, grid.lwd = 5, xmargin = 0.2, lab.cex = .7, xlab = '',
            ylab = '', border = NA, axis.cex = .8, leg.cex = .7,
            leg.col='white', 
            title = "UNHCR-recognised refugees\nTop 10 countries (2003-13)\n")

Installation

Install stable version from CRAN using

install.packages("alluvial")

or development version from GitHub using remotes::install_github():

remotes::install_github("mbojan/alluvial", build_vignettes=TRUE)

References

Brunson, Jason Cory. 2020. “ggalluvial: Layered Grammar for Alluvial Plots.” Journal of Open Source Software 5 (49): 2017. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02017.

Brunson, Jason Cory, and Quentin D. Read. 2020. “Ggalluvial: Alluvial Plots in ’Ggplot2’.” http://corybrunson.github.io/ggalluvial/.

R Core Team. 2021. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/.