Hi Paolo, there are different types of circular plots, do you have something in mind already (besides the circularity)?

For example it comes to my mind plots like those made with Circos (http://circos.ca), which you can make with the Circos software itself (downloadable from the same page) or with the package RCircos for R (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/RCircos/vignettes/Using_RCircos.pdf).

Best regards.

Hi Paolo,

for sure a circular plot could be an option like a bi-partite chord diagram (e.g. https://www.visualcinnamon.com/2015/08/stretched-chord.html), but there are many other layouts that could fit your needs. For instance: a sankey diagram (http://fedspendingtransparency.github.io/data-lab/budget-sankey/) or a heat-map (http://bl.ocks.org/tjdecke/5558084). Please, consider that without much more details about your visualization goals, it is extremely complicated to provide you with some good advice.

Concerning the ways to arrange your datasets, it depends on the tool / software you want to use and how your data actually look like. Possible choices could be an online tool (e.g.: RAW: http://rawgraphs.io/; or Google Charts: https://developers.google.com/chart/) or a commercial software (e.g.: Tableau: https://www.tableau.com/). Otherwise, you could implement your solutions through some graphical libraries of languages like R (ggplot2 universe available at https://cran.r-project.org/) or Python (Plotly: https://plot.ly/).

Hope it and feel free to write me for any further comment.

Best regards,

Luca

In R it is quite simple, provided that you are confident with basic R, here are some rows that could help you:

### start ###

library(circlize)

## let X be a matrix object (an adjacency matrix for instance)

## but... let try with a contingency table!

X

Thanks everybody! Following your suggestions I was able to get what I had in mind.

My concern was if this kind of visualization could only apply to flows (e.g. migrations between countries, trades, etc.), but (thanks Giuseppe), it seems to make sense also with contingency tables.

Attached a simple example from my data: several uses of medicinal plants reported by males and females.

Thanks again for your help

Paolo

Put my two cents. In this 'rainbow-like' circular diagram we can see distribution of the slope angles by 25 bathymetric profiles (you can modify it to your research, of course): https://github.com/paulinelemenkova/R-15-Circular-Barplot/blob/master/Rainbow.pdf Made in R using this code:

Code R script to plot rainbow-circular barplot for statistical an...

Another example: 'flow-with-petals'-like diagram: https://github.com/paulinelemenkova/R-15-Circular-Barplot/blob/master/Circular%20Barplot%20with%20Groups_Tectonics.pdf

or the same but with petals arranged according to the length (i.e. contribution):

https://github.com/paulinelemenkova/R-15-Circular-Barplot/blob/master/Circular%20Barplot%20with%20Groups_Tectonics-arranged.pdf

Made also in R using this code:

Code R script for circular barplot with groups (tectonic plates, ...

Euler-Venn circular diagram may be useful for you: the crossing of the leaves of this flower show the common features between the neighbour petals (in my case environmental factoos and tectonic plates). Made in R using this code: Code R script to plot Euler-Venn diagram showing the relationship...