How to Draw Interactive Steamgraph in R

Streamgraph is a type of stacked area graph which is displaced around a central axis, resulting in a flowing, organic shape. Streamgraphs and their use were popularized by Lee Byron in a February 2008 New York Times article on movie box office revenues.

Data

Here we have census data about GDP values in some counties in southeast China.

---

Convert to 1-dimensional table

We have a 2-dimensional table above. Before drawing streamgraph, we need to convert 2-dimensional table to 1-dimensional table. We can use Microsoft Excel to convert it.

Press Alt + D + P, then we have the widget.

Select the data need to be ploted.

Hit complate.

Now we have a new table, double click the bottom right sum value. Then we will have a 1-dimensional table.

---

Draw the graph in Rstudio

Because read_csv can not read Chinese characters correctly, we use read_excel to input the data.

library(readxl)
df = read_excel("your_file_path/one_dimension.xlsx")

Install streamgraph package from github.

devtools::install_github("hrbrmstr/streamgraph")

Draw the graph；

streamgraph(df, key="name", value="gdp", date="year" , offset="zero") %>%
  sg_fill_tableau() %>%  # set color
  sg_axis_x(tick_interval = 1) %>%  # set x-axis interval as one year
  sg_legend(TRUE, "Name: ")  # add legend

---

References

GitHub | hrbrmstr | streamgraph

Art from data | #155 INTERACTIVE STREAMGRAPH | CHANGE OFFSET