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How I Made That: Network Diagrams of All the Household Types

Process the data into a usable format, which makes the visualization part more straightforward.

The How I Made That series describes the process behind a graphic and includes code and data to work with.

With visualization, there’s a lot of filtering and aggregation so that it’s easier to see general patterns. But lately I’ve been more curious about what we can see from visualizing everything. So I made network diagrams for 4,708 household types in the United States.

Here’s how I made them using Python and R.

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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.