Sunburst Charts in R

How to make sunburst charts in R with Plotly.

New to Plotly?

Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for R. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

Basic Sunburst Chart

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly(
  labels = c("Eve", "Cain", "Seth", "Enos", "Noam", "Abel", "Awan", "Enoch", "Azura"),
  parents = c("", "Eve", "Eve", "Seth", "Seth", "Eve", "Eve", "Awan", "Eve"),
  values = c(10, 14, 12, 10, 2, 6, 6, 4, 4),
  type = 'sunburst'
)

fig

Branchvalues

With branchvalues "total", the value of the parent represents the width of its wedge. In the example below, "Enoch" is 4 and "Awan" is 6 and so Enoch's width is 4/6ths of Awans. With branchvalues "remainder", the parent's width is determined by its own value plus those of its children. So, Enoch's width is 4/10ths of Awan's (4 / (6 + 4)).

Note that this means that the sum of the values of the children cannot exceed the value of their parent when branchvalues "total". When branchvalues "relative" (the default), children will not take up all of the space below their parent (unless the parent is the root and it has a value of 0).

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly(
  labels = c("Eve", "Cain", "Seth", "Enos", "Noam", "Abel", "Awan", "Enoch", "Azura"),
  parents = c("", "Eve", "Eve", "Seth", "Seth", "Eve", "Eve", "Awan", "Eve"),
  values = c(65, 14, 12, 10, 2, 6, 6, 4, 4),
  type = 'sunburst',
  branchvalues = 'total'
)

fig

Sunburst with Repeated Labels

library(plotly)

d <- data.frame(
    ids = c(
    "North America", "Europe", "Australia", "North America - Football", "Soccer",
    "North America - Rugby", "Europe - Football", "Rugby",
    "Europe - American Football","Australia - Football", "Association",
    "Australian Rules", "Autstralia - American Football", "Australia - Rugby",
    "Rugby League", "Rugby Union"
  ),
  labels = c(
    "North<br>America", "Europe", "Australia", "Football", "Soccer", "Rugby",
    "Football", "Rugby", "American<br>Football", "Football", "Association",
    "Australian<br>Rules", "American<br>Football", "Rugby", "Rugby<br>League",
    "Rugby<br>Union"
  ),
  parents = c(
    "", "", "", "North America", "North America", "North America", "Europe",
    "Europe", "Europe","Australia", "Australia - Football", "Australia - Football",
    "Australia - Football", "Australia - Football", "Australia - Rugby",
    "Australia - Rugby"
  ),
  stringsAsFactors = FALSE
)

fig <- plot_ly(d, ids = ~ids, labels = ~labels, parents = ~parents, type = 'sunburst')

fig

Controlling text orientation inside sunburst sectors

The insidetextorientation attribute controls the orientation of text inside sectors. With "auto" the texts may automatically be rotated to fit with the maximum size inside the slice. Using "horizontal" (resp. "radial", "tangential") forces text to be horizontal (resp. radial or tangential). Note that plotly may reduce the font size in order to fit the text with the requested orientation.

df = read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/718417069ead87650b90472464c7565dc8c2cb1c/coffee-flavors.csv')

fig <- plot_ly()

fig <- fig %>% add_trace(
  type='sunburst',
  ids=df$ids,
  labels=df$labels,
  parents=df$parents,
  domain=list(column=1),
  maxdepth=2,
  insidetextorientation='radial'
)
fig

Subplots

In order to create sunburst chart subplots, we use the domain attribute and the layout grid attribute.

library(plotly)

d1 <- read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/master/coffee-flavors.csv')
d2 <- read.csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/plotly/datasets/718417069ead87650b90472464c7565dc8c2cb1c/sunburst-coffee-flavors-complete.csv')
fig <- plot_ly() 
fig <- fig %>%
  add_trace(
    ids = d1$ids,
    labels = d1$labels,
    parents = d1$parents,
    type = 'sunburst',
    maxdepth = 2,
    domain = list(column = 0)
    ) 
fig <- fig %>%
  add_trace(
    ids = d2$ids,
    labels = d2$labels,
    parents = d2$parents,
    type = 'sunburst',
    maxdepth = 3,
    domain = list(column = 1)
  ) 
fig <- fig %>%
    layout(
      grid = list(columns =2, rows = 1),
      margin = list(l = 0, r = 0, b = 0, t = 0),
      sunburstcolorway = c(
        "#636efa","#EF553B","#00cc96","#ab63fa","#19d3f3",
        "#e763fa", "#FECB52","#FFA15A","#FF6692","#B6E880"
      ),
      extendsunburstcolors = TRUE)
fig

Reference

See https://plotly.com/r/reference/#sunburst for more information and chart attribute options!

What About Dash?

Dash for R is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash for R at https://dashr.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig, you can display the same figure in a Dash for R application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dashCoreComponents package like this:

library(plotly)

fig <- plot_ly() 
# fig <- fig %>% add_trace( ... )
# fig <- fig %>% layout( ... ) 

library(dash)
library(dashCoreComponents)
library(dashHtmlComponents)

app <- Dash$new()
app$layout(
    htmlDiv(
        list(
            dccGraph(figure=fig) 
        )
     )
)

app$run_server(debug=TRUE, dev_tools_hot_reload=FALSE)