That said, circos plots are sort of cliche in genomics and I do see people tending to move away from them.
It suffers from an effect of having too many things all together, all at once, layered in ways that sometimes make it difficult to compare. This is especially true when you have data tracks that are circularly laid out around the plot.
Case in point: the maize genome Circos plot popped up in Jurassic World, they just overlayed an image of a Triceratops https://circos.ca/images/mastheads/
I know in five seconds if a Circos plot is worth looking at.
e.g. https://scc.ms.unimelb.edu.au/resources/data-visualisation-a...
I'm kinda suspicious that any data visualization that uses a circle is going to be hard to draw meaning from.
They aren’t good at measuring small quantities. But it is easy to see 1/4 or 1/2 of a circle. And it is easy to see if something is a straight line, 90 degree, or a little more or less than either of those.
Compared to a bar graph, it seems a little easier to spot that one quantity is, like, half of another. And it is easier to visually sum of a collection of quantities, on a bar graph this is a major pain (unless it is stacked of course but that’s another type of graph).
https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/IP-Link
(there is a link to the documentation with some nice chord diagrams.) This one is quite impressive: https://github.com/cedricbonhomme/IP-Link/blob/master/docs/_... nut not easy to read !
re some of the viz comments here, most sankey diagrams can be pie charts (any one with less than a few nested categories) and most people who make pie charts don't reason about trees so all the junk sankey diagrams that flooded in after the birthday party chart aren't a reflection of their use or value.
messages I've used viz for in the past were to solve problems like:
- these things are similar and different (heatmap)
- this is a bounded domain (digraph/ontology)
- these things are related, but only relative to these other things (graph clusters, radial/linear network diagram, boxes+lines/nested boxes)
- the complexity is more here than there (graph clusters)
- the taxonomy hides an inconsistency or gap (sankey diagrams)
- either everybody sees this or nobody does (graph clusters)
- these variations cause combinatoric explosion (sankey diagram)
- this is a hierarchy (dendrogram, radial dendrogram)
- these are categories of things (dendrogram, radial dendrogram)
- these things are the same (heatmap)
- start with these to have the most effect on those (cluster graph)
- solutions are in the form of this grammar (sankey diagram)
- these things happen in order (state machine/flow chart, gantt chart)
- these things happen together (gantt chart)
The statements may seem naive, but when you're working on a viz, you have to think about who it is for and whether it is the right representation and whether the message is valuable. I've made a lot of viz mistakes and they came down to not framing one of these messages correctly or misunderstanding how telling someone this would make them feel. the radial diagrams are pretty, and very useful for showing contrast between patterns and density of relationships.
https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2009/06/15/gr.092759....
Does anyone have a link to a particularly amazing circos chart that demonstrates the kind of story that it is best at conveying?