Sankey Diagrams using Tableau


    Anyone who has studied about Data Visualization must have come across Sankey Charts. The most famous of them was published by Data Visualization expert Edward Tufte. The best statistical graph ever.


    It tells the story of the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the Russian campaign of 1812. Beginning at the Polish-Russian border, the thick band shows the size of the army at each position. The path of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in the bitterly cold winter is depicted by the dark lower band.

    It always fascinated me what tools Tufte would have used to create this. Today we can achieve by a variety of tools like Google Analytics, Python, Excel, d3.js etc. I tried to create one using Tableau. Below is the cool viz which is interactive and shows some understanding of Sankey Diagrams in Tableau and how intuitive they are to create.

     Tableau link here Sankey Diagram



   
    The Austin Animal Center Outcomes data shows the outcome of processing for different breeds of animal. The measure is the count of total animals in each Breed. Looking at how an animal was classified when they entered the system, this chart shows the outcome processing that took the animal out of the system.

     By clicking on a flow, you can see the total animals in any flow. Many domestic short haired Breed (over 10k) were transferred to other agencies or adopted. While all Bats that came out of the Animal Center were euthanized.

     I have used Tableau, Rank and Sigmoid functions to create this graph. Sankey diagrams are generally used to depict the flow of information from one category to other. In the above viz I used two categories Breed and Outcome Type of animals in an Austin Animal Centre dataset. When we select the Breed on the left we can see how much percentage of animals are moved out of the system and in what way on the right. Similary Outcome type can be selected on the right to see which Breed of animals were sent to the group.

     MySQL was used to format the data and data cleaning before uploading to Tableau.

    There is a website which has all the information ever happened with Sankey diagrams. It also has a visualization which predicts the 2018 FIFA world cup winner. Here is a good read to that link.

                                              Sankey Diagrams FIFA 2018

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