Today I wanted to quickly share my first real attempt at making an alluvial diagram. For those not familiar (and I wasn’t previously) an alluvial diagram is a type of flow plot that is essentially equivalent to a sankey diagram. The difference is that while sankey diagrams show flow for different categorical variables, alluvial plots show change over time. To produce the alluvial diagram below, I’ll be using the development version of the excellent ggforce package written by Thomas Lin Pedersen, who’s not only incredibly talented, but also a good follow on twitter.

In this post, I’d like to share some work related to geo-spatial mapping, statewide school ratings, and US Census Bureau data using census tracts. Specifically, I wanted to investigate whether there was a relation between the median housing price in an area, and the statewide achievement ratings for schools in the corresponding area. There is a strong relation between socio-economic status and student achievement, but less is known about how statewide ratings for schools relate to the demographics of the corresponding area.

This is the first of a series of posts to introduce my new esvis R package, why I think it’s important, and some of its capabilities. As of this writing the current version on CRAN is 0.0.1, so it’s obviously still fresh and may have some bugs. If you find any, please let me know. You can install the package like you would any other on R install.packages("esvis") or if you’d prefer the sometimes buggy but more feature-heavy development version, install from github with devtools.