Find out about Quad-Tile Charts and create your personal with Python

In information visualization, the dimensions and form of the canvas that’s obtainable is all the time a key issue. It’s a subject I’ve addressed in one other latest article with a chart I name the Crystal Bar Chart that makes use of a two-axis strategy as a way to preserve area.

On this article, I’ll discover an axis-free strategy I’ve developed to visualise a set of values as squares and preserve area by packing a container within the type of a convex or easy concave polygon. I’ve additionally performed my greatest to replenish this exploration with code, so I hope it could function a enjoyable tutorial for another sorts of strategies and visualizations that may be helpful.

The objective to perform by the top of this text can be to contemplate normal and unconventional container shapes (as proven beneath) and current a set of values as comparable shapes inside them in a approach that optimizes the obtainable area, provides intuitive measurement comparisons, and squarifies your information!

Earlier than we get into the brand new axis-free strategy, let’s mirror on some present axis-based and axis-free strategies to see if we are able to discover a good competitor to measure outcomes in opposition to. For instance information, I’ll leverage some data from Wikipedia that represents the highest 20 quickest animal speeds¹.

Axis-Primarily based Information Sequence Visualization

Given a y-axis to signify an merchandise’s worth, it’s laborious to compete with a sorted bar chart. Let’s plot that first, adopted by a pair extra axis-based charts utilizing my vizmath package deal.

Bar Chart

# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastest_animals (as of 1/26/2024)
# 20 quickest animals (prime pace, mph)
information = {…