# Interactive Chord Diagrams

## Preamble¶

In [2]:
:dep chord = {Version = "0.1.4"}
use chord::{Chord, Plot};


## Introduction¶

In a chord diagram (or radial network), entities are arranged radially as segments with their relationships visualised by arcs that connect them. The size of the segments illustrates the numerical proportions, whilst the size of the arc illustrates the significance of the relationships1.

Chord diagrams are useful when trying to convey relationships between different entities, and they can be beautiful and eye-catching.

### The Chord Crate¶

I wasn't able to find any Rust crates for plotting chord diagrams, so I ported my own from Python to Rust.

You can get the package either from crates.io or from the GitHub repository. With your processed data, you should be able to plot something beautiful with just a single line, Chord{ matrix : matrix, names : names, .. Chord::default() }.show()

### The Dataset¶

The focus for this section will be the demonstration of the chord package. To keep it simple, we will use synthetic data that illustrates the co-occurrences between movie genres within the same movie.

In [30]:
let matrix: Vec<Vec<f64>> = vec![
vec![0., 5., 6., 4., 7., 4.],
vec![5., 0., 5., 4., 6., 5.],
vec![6., 5., 0., 4., 5., 5.],
vec![4., 4., 4., 0., 5., 5.],
vec![7., 6., 5., 5., 0., 4.],
vec![4., 5., 5., 5., 4., 0.],
];

let names: Vec<String> = vec![
"Action",
"Comedy",
"Drama",
"Fantasy",
"Thriller",
]
.into_iter()
.map(String::from)
.collect();


## Chord Diagrams¶

Let's see what the Chord defaults produce when we invoke the show() method.

In [32]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[32]:
Chord Diagram

### Different Colours¶

The defaults are nice, but what if we want different colours? You can pass in almost anything from d3-scale-chromatic, or you could pass in a list of hexadecimal colour codes.

In [33]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: "d3.schemeSet2".to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[33]:
Chord Diagram
In [34]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: format!("d3.schemeGnBu[{:?}]",names.len()).to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[34]:
Chord Diagram
In [35]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: "d3.schemeSet3".to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[35]:
Chord Diagram
In [36]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: format!("d3.schemePuRd[{:?}]",names.len()).to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[36]:
Chord Diagram
In [37]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: format!("d3.schemeYlGnBu[{:?}]",names.len()).to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[37]:
Chord Diagram
In [38]:
let hex_colours : Vec<String> = vec!["#222222", "#333333", "#4c4c4c", "#666666", "#848484", "#9a9a9a"].into_iter()
.map(String::from)
.collect();

Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: true,
colors: format!("{:?}",hex_colours),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[38]:
Chord Diagram

### Label Styling¶

We can disable wrapped labels, and even change the colour.

In [39]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
wrap_labels: false,
label_color:"#4c40bf".to_string(),
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[39]:
Chord Diagram

### Opacity¶

We can also change the default opacity of the relationships.

In [40]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
opacity: 0.1,
..Chord::default()
}
.show();

Out[40]:
Chord Diagram

### Width¶

We can also change the maximum width the plot.

In [41]:
Chord {
matrix: matrix.clone(),
names: names.clone(),
width: 400.0,
wrap_labels: true,
..Chord::default()
}
.show()

Out[41]:
Chord Diagram

## Conclusion¶

In this section, we've introduced the chord diagram and chord crate. We used the crate and some synthetic data to demonstrate several chord diagram visualisations with different configurations. The chord Python package is available for free from crates.io or from the GitHub repository.

1. Tintarev, N., Rostami, S., & Smyth, B. (2018, April). Knowing the unknown: visualising consumption blind-spots in recommender systems. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 1396-1399).

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