How to Make Stacked Area Charts in R
From the basic area chart, to the stacked version, to the streamgraph, the geometry is similar. Once you know how to do one, you can do them all.
Back in 2008, The New York Times, with the help of Lee Byron, published a streamgraph that showed the ebb and flow of box office receipts. The graphic was based on Byron’s previous work with last.fm listening habits, and it was well-received by many, while others argued that it was not as accurate as it could be. Byron, along with Martin Wattenberg, later argued in their paper that while some accuracy is sacrificed, the balance of aesthetics and traditional chart-making make for a worthwhile chart.
In this tutorial you learn what goes into the streamgraph and end up with a simple function that you can easily use with other datasets.
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About the Author
Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.
