Forum Discussion
Visualization Suggestion - Category Changes Over Time
I am looking for advice on how to best analyze/visualize the following data. Each year customers are grouped into one of 5 categories, including a non-customer category. The goal is to quantify shifts between categories over years. Below is sample data:
| Customer ID | FY Last | FY-1 | FY-2 |
| 123 | Category 1 | Category 1 | Category 1 |
| 234 | Category 4 | Category 2 | non-customer |
| 345 | Category 2 | non-customer | Category 1 |
| 456 | Category 4 | Category 3 | Category 3 |
| 567 | non-customer | Category 3 | Category 3 |
| 678 | Category 1 | non-customer | non-customer |
One option I thought of would be to build additional columns to quantify the direction for each customer from one-year to the next, but this already would have 25(?) options since each of the five categories could land in the five categories the subsequent year. Does anyone have a suggestion of how I might (a) show generalized trends/flow between categories from one year to the next? (b) Organize the data to get a simple table that might provide an output like:
| FY | non-customer | Category 1 | Category 2 | Category 3 | Category 4 |
| FY Last | 1 | 2 | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| FY-1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
| FY-2 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
One last note - these are progressive categories, so ideally customers would move into category 1 and towards category 4 over time.
Actually just noticed PowerBI has a Sankey visualizaiton which is exactly what I was looking for!
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-awesomeness-unlocked-sankey-diagram/
4 Replies
Actually just noticed PowerBI has a Sankey visualizaiton which is exactly what I was looking for!
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/visual-awesomeness-unlocked-sankey-diagram/
Thanks, this works for the matrix visualization which is helpful. I'm wondering if there's a visualization to do something like this, at least from one year to the next even if multiple years becomes too complicated.
