Circlize

Chord diagram is an unique and effective way to visualize relationships and flows.

The circlize package developed by Zuguang Gu enables drawing chord diagram in a relatively easy way.

First need to install and load circlize package.

library(circlize)

Now create a matrix. Each column labels and row labels of this matrix will become a node in the diagram. And column and row labels will each take up half of the circle

mat = matrix(1:20, 4, 5) 
rownames(mat) = paste0("Q", 1:4) 
colnames(mat) = paste0("Area", 1:5)

Then use chordDiagram command for a quick plot.As the color is randomly generated, we could use set.seed() to get a consistent result

set.seed(685)
circos.par(cell.padding = c(0, 0, 0, 0))
chordDiagram(mat, order = c("Q1", "Q2", "Q3", "Q4", "Area1", "Area2", "Area3", "Area4", "Area5"))

circos.clear()