Tag: parlidata

Experimenting With Sankey Diagrams in R and Python

A couple of days ago, I spotted a post by Oli Hawkins on Visualising migration between the countries of the UK which linked to a Sankey diagram demo of Internal migration flows in the UK.

One of the things that interests me about the Jupyter and RStudio centred reproducible research ecosystems is their support for libraries that generate interactive HTML/javascript outputs (charts, maps, etc) from a computational data analysis context such as R, or python/pandas, so it was only natural (?!) that I though I should see how easy it would be to generate something similar from a code context.

In an R context, there are several libraries available that support the generation of Sankey diagrams, including googleVis (which wraps Google Chart tools), and a couple of packages that wrap d3.js – an original rCharts Sankey diagram demo by @timelyporfolio, and a more recent HTMLWidgets demo (sankeyD3).

Here’s an example of the evolution of my Sankey diagram in R using googleVis – the Rmd code is here and a version of the knitred HTML output is here.

The original data comprised a matrix relating population flows between English regions, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The simplest rendering of the data using the googleViz Sankey diagram generator produces an output that uses default colours to label the nodes.

Using the country code indicator at the start of each region/country identifier, we can generate a mapping from country to a country colour that can then be used to identify the country associated with each node.

One of the settings for the diagram allows the source (or target) node colour to determine the edge colour. We can also play with the values we use as node labels:

If we exclude edges relating to flow between regions of the same country, we get a diagram that is more reminiscent of Oli’s orignal (country level) demo. Note also that the charts that are generated are interactive – in this case, we see a popup that describes the flow along one particular edge.

If we associate a country with each region, we can group the data and sum the flow values to produce country level flows. Charting this produces a chart similar to the original inspiration.

As well as providing the code for generating each of the above Sankey diagrams, the Rmd file linked above also includes demonstrations for generating basic Sankey diagrams for the original dataset using the rCharts and htmlwidgets R libraries.

In order to provide a point of comparison, I also generated a python/pandas workflow using Jupyter notebooks and the ipysankey widget. (In fact, I generated the full workflow through the different chart versions first in pandas – I find it an easier language to think in than R! – and then used that workflow as a crib for the R version…)

The original notebook is here and an example of the HTML version of it here. Note that I tried to save a rasterisation of the widgets but they don’t seem to have turned out that well…

The original (default) diagram looks like this:

and the final version, after a bit of data wrangling, looks like this:

Once again, all the code is provided in the notebook.

One of the nice things about all these packages is that they produce outputs than can be reused/embedded elsewhere, or that can be used as a first automatically produced draft of code that can be tweaked by hand. I’ll have more to say about that in a future post…

Reuse and Build On – IW Broadband Reports

A couple of weeks ago I posted a demo of how to automate the production of a templated report (catchment for GP practices by LSOA on the Isle of Wight) using Rmd and knitr (Reporting in a Repeatable, Parameterised, Transparent Way).

Today, I noticed another report, with data, from the House of Commons Library on Superfast Broadband Coverage in the UK. This reports at the ward level rather than the LSOA level the GP report was based on, so I wondered how easy it would be to reuse the GP/LSOA code for a broadband/ward map…

After fighting with the Excel data file (metadata rows before the header and at the end of the table, cruft rows between the header and data table proper) and the R library I was using to read the file (it turned the data into a tibble, with spacey column names I couldn’t get to work with ggplot, rather than a dataframe – I ended saving to CSV then loading back in again…), not many changes were required to the code at all… What I really should have done was abstracted the code in to an R file (and maybe some importable Rmd chunks) and tried to get the script down to as few lines of bespoke code to handle the new dataset as possible – maybe next time…

The code is here and example PDF here.

I also had a quick play at generating a shiny app from the code (again, cut and pasting rather than abstracting into a separate file and importing… I guess at least now I have three files to look at when trying to abstract the code and to test against…!)

Shiny code here.

So what?

So this has got me thinking – what are the commonly produced “types” of report or report section, and what bits of common/reusuble code would make it easy to generate new automation scripts, at least at a first pass, for a new dataset?

Reporting in a Repeatable, Parameterised, Transparent Way

Earlier this week, I spent a day chatting to folk from the House of Commons Library as a part of a temporary day-a-week-or-so bit of work I’m doing with the Parliamentary Digital Service.

During one of the conversations on matters loosely geodata-related with Carl Baker, Carl mentioned an NHS Digital data set describing the number of people on a GP Practice list who live within a particular LSOA (Lower Super Output Area). There are possible GP practice closures on the Island at the moment, so I thought this might be an interesting dataset to play with in that respect.

Another thing Carl is involved with is producing a regularly updated briefing on Accident and Emergency Statistics. Excel and QGIS templates do much of the work in producing the updated documents, so much of the data wrangling side of the report generation is automated using those tools. Supporting regular updating of briefings, as well as answering specific, ad hoc questions from MPs, producing debate briefings and other current topic briefings, seems to be an important Library activity.

As I’ve been looking for opportunities to compare different automation routes using things like Jupyter notebooks and RMarkdown, I thought I’d have a play with the GP list/LSOA data, showing how we might be able to use each of those two routes to generate maps showing the geographical distribution, across LSOAs at least, for GP practices on the Isle of Wight. This demonstrates several things, including: data ingest; filtering according to practice codes accessed from another dataset; importing a geoJSON shapefile; generating a choropleth map using the shapefile matched to the GP list LSOA codes.

The first thing I tried was using a python/pandas Jupyter notebook to create a choropleth map for a particular practice using the folium library. This didn’t take long to do at all – I’ve previously built an NHS admin database that lets me find practice codes associated with a particular CCG, such as the Isle of Wight CCG, as well as a notebook that generates a choropleth over LSOA boundaries, so it was simply a case of copying and pasting old bits of code and adding in the new dataset.You can see a rendered example of the notebook here (download).

One thing you might notice from the rendered notebook is that I actually “widgetised” it, allowing users of the live notebook to select a particular practice and render the associated map.

Whilst I find the Jupyter notebooks to provide a really friendly and accommodating environment for pulling together a recipe such as this, the report generation workflows are arguably still somewhat behind the workflows supported by RStudio and in particular the knitr tools.

So what does an RStudio workflow have to offer? Using Rmarkdown (Rmd) we can combine text, code and code outputs in much the same way as we can in a Jupyter notebook, but with slightly more control over the presentation of the output.

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For example, from a single Rmd file we can knit an output HTML file that incorporates an interactive leaflet map, or a static PDF document.

It’s also possible to use a parameterised report generation workflow to generate separate reports for each practice. For example, applying this parameterised report generation script to a generic base template report will generate a set of PDF reports on a per practice basis for each practice on the Isle of Wight.

The bookdown package, which I haven’t played with yet, also looks promising for its ability to generate a single output document from a set of source documents. (I have a question in about the extent to which bookdown supports partially parameterised compound document creation).

Having started thinking about comparisons between Excel, Jupyter and RStudio workflows, possible next steps are:

  • to look for sensible ways of comparing the workflow associated with each,
  • the ramp-up skills required, and blockers (including cultural blockers (also administrative / organisational blockers, h/t @dasbarrett)) associated with getting started with new tools such as Jupyter or RStudio, and
  • the various ways in which each tool/workflow supports: transparency; maintainability; extendibility; correctness; reuse; integration with other tools; ease and speed of use.

It would also be interesting to explore how much time and effort would actually be involved in trying to port a legacy Excel report generating template to Rmd or ipynb, and what sorts of issue would be likely to arise, and what benefits Excel offers compared to Jupyter and RStudio workflows.