Forum Discussion

sdrljaca's avatar
sdrljaca
Frequent Visitor
3 years ago

Deneb: Packing instead of Overlapping Bubbles in Scatter Plot

Hi, I am learning Deneb and Vega-Ligt and I love it. But bubbles are overlaping and I can not make bubbles Packing (as it is called in Charticulator). How? Thank you!
Bubbles
Deveb
Overlapping
Packing
Scatter
giammariam's avatar
giammariam
Solution Sage
3 years ago

sdrljaca thanks for the additional info. I see that I mistakenly inserted the wrong link in my response above. This post explains how to do this. Essentially though you could use cloud storage such as google drive, onedrive, dropbox, or github, and then share the link here.

sdrljaca's avatar
sdrljaca
Frequent Visitor
3 years ago

Hi, here is the Link 

Thank you for trying to help me,

Srđan

  • giammariam's avatar
    giammariam
    Solution Sage
    3 years ago

    Hey sdrljaca. So I've spent a ton of time on this because it is an interesting problem to try and solve. I've tried various approaches. Here's a couple notes.

    • The pack transform is only available in Vega, not Vega-Lite.
    • In Vega
      • I first faceted the dataset and set the row encoding to Site and the column encoding to Start-Up Year. I was able to recreate the original chart with this method, with the intent of applying the pack transform on each facet. I then performed data transforms to create the parent-child hierarchy necessary for the pack transform by fabricating a root node for each facet. This is where things started to break down. I couldn't figure out a way to perform the circle pack transform for each of these hierarchies, I could only perform it on a single dataset.
    • In Vega-Lite, I performed the same steps and looked into the steps involved in various circle packing algorithms with the crazy notion of trying to calculate the individual pack layouts through multiple transforms. Unfortunately, due to the recursive nature required for determining a given pack layout, vega/vega-lite transforms were just not set up for this.

    I very well could be wrong, but ultimately it appears to me that the circle packing layout for each combination of Site and Start-Up Year would need to be computed outside of Vega/Vega-Lite using a circle packing algorithm. If you have access to query the source data via SQL, this could possibly be done with recursive CTEs. The resulting layout would then need to be loaded into Deneb as the source dataset.

     

    Alternatively, this absolutely all could be done by building a Power BI Custom Visual using d3.js, but that would require quite a significant L.O.E. 

     

    I'm not 100% convinced that this is impossible through faceting in Vega, but I was unable to figure it out. I'm going to tag some of the Deneb experts here to see if any of them have any thoughts.

    Here are some files to get going if anybody out there has the bandwidth to look at this.