Visualization Suggestion - Category Changes Over Time

[jeggen]

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.

[jeggen · Accepted solution]

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/

[MFelix]

Hi @jeggen ,

It's a good visualization but there is a specific modelling that you need to do in order to get the nodes in the correct order.

[MFelix]

Hi @jeggen ,

For this you need to unpivot your data and then you can you can use the columns on a matrix visualization:

[jeggen]

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.

https://public.tableau.com/views/SimpleSankey/Sankey?:embed=y&:display_count=no&:showTabs=y&:showViz...