Alluvial diagrams are a type of
flow diagram
Flow diagram is a collective term for a diagram representing a flow or set of dynamic relationships in a system. The term flow diagram is also used as a synonym for flowchart, and sometimes as a counterpart of the flowchart.Harris. (1999, p. 156 ...
originally developed to represent changes in network structure over time.
In allusion to both their visual appearance and their emphasis on flow, alluvial diagrams are named after
alluvial fan
An alluvial fan is an accumulation of sediments that fans outwards from a concentrated source of sediments, such as a narrow canyon emerging from an escarpment. They are characteristic of mountainous terrain in arid to semiarid climates, but a ...
s that are
naturally formed by the soil deposited from streaming water.
Interpretation
In an alluvial diagram, blocks represent clusters of nodes, and stream fields between the blocks represent changes in the composition of these clusters over time. The height of a block represents the size of the cluster and the height of a stream field represents the size of the components contained in both blocks connected by the stream field.
Application
Alluvial diagrams were originally developed to visualize structural change in large
complex network
In the context of network theory, a complex network is a graph (network) with non-trivial topological features—features that do not occur in simple networks such as lattices or random graphs but often occur in networks representing real s ...
s. They can be used to visualize any type of change in group composition between states or over time and include statistical information to reveal significant change. Alluvial diagrams highlight important structural changes that can be further emphasized by color, and make identification of major transitions easy.
Alluvial diagrams can also be used to illustrate patterns of flow on a fixed network over time. The ''Users Flow'' feature of Google Analytics uses alluvial diagrams to graphically represent how visitors move among the nodes (individual pages) on a website.
Sankey Diagram - google charts
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See also
* Sankey diagram
Sankey diagrams are a type of flow diagram in which the width of the arrows is proportional to the flow rate.
Sankey diagrams can also visualize the energy accounts, material flow accounts on a regional or national level, and cost breakdowns. ...
References
External links
Alluvial generator implemented in Javascript
- Create alluvial diagrams from network data and export to SVG
RAWGraphs: an open source data visualization tool
- Create alluvial diagrams from dataset and export to SVG or PNG
Users Flow for Google Analytics
{{DEFAULTSORT:Alluvial Diagram
Diagrams