The package spiralize visualizes data along an Archimedean spiral. It has two major advantages for visualization:

1. It is able to visualize data with very long axis with high resolution.
2. It is efficient for time series data to reveal periodic patterns.

Zuguang Gu, et al., spiralize: an R package for Visualizing Data on Spirals, Bioinformatics, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btab778

The package is available on CRAN and can be installed by:

install.packages("spiralize")

If you want the latest version, install it directly from GitHub:

library(devtools)
install_github("jokergoo/spiralize")

It includes three steps:

1. initialize the spiral,
2. add a track,
3. add graphics in the track.

Step 2 and 3 can be applied multiple times to allow multiple-track visualization along the spiral.

The code for making spiral plot looks like follows:

library(spiralize)
spiral_initialize(...)
spiral_track(...)
spiral_points(...)
...

Complex plots are baiscally constructed from simple graphics. Here there are following low-level graphics functions:

• spiral_points()
• spiral_lines()
• spiral_rect()
• spiral_segments()
• spiral_polygon()
• spiral_bars()
• spiral_text()
• spiral_axis()
• spiral_yaxis()
• spiral_raster()

Particularlly, horizon chart is very suitable to put on the spiral, thus there is one function for this:

• spiral_horizon()

Spiral plot can also visualize dendrograms with large number of leaves, thus there are following two functions:

• spiral_dendrogram()
• spiral_phylo()

There are the following vignettes:

• Visualize Data on Spirals. It gives an detailed introduction of the spiralize package.
• Initialize Spirals by Special Data Types. It introduces how to specifically create spiral plot with time series data and genomic data.
• Annotate the Plot. It introduces how to add annotations and how to add legends to the plot.
• Real World Examples. It contains many examples with real world datasets.
• Visualize tree of life of 50455 species.

1. Difference of ggplot2 daily downloads to the mean of the current year (2015-2021). Each loop contains 52 weeks so that same weeks in different years locate at the same angle in the polar coordinates.

2. The same data as the first one, but horizon chart is used. Also title and legends are added.

3. A phylogenetic life tree with 50645 species.

4. The spiral COVID-19 Shiny app

https://jokergoooo.shinyapps.io/covid19/

MIT @ Zuguang Gu