Data visualization offers the best approach for business owners or professionals to communicate data to audiences with non-technical backgrounds.
It is one of the most significant ways to simplify the complexity of understanding relationships among data. A Sankey Diagram is one such powerful technique for visualizing the association between data elements.
They are named after the Irishman Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, who first used them in a 1898 publication on the energy efficiency of a steam engine.
They can be difficult, time-consuming, and tedious to draw by hand. Still, nowadays you can use various tools to generate these diagrams automatically, such as Business Intelligence tools like Tableau, Google Visualization, and D3.js.
So what are Sankey Diagrams in Data Visualization, and how can they be useful?
Sankey diagrams are essentially flow diagrams in which the width of lines connecting two nodes is proportional to the value of a metric or key performance indicator.
You can also present this kind of information using neural networks and association analysis diagrams. They provide
- flexibility,
- interactivity for the business user to get insight into data at a fast pace
They are a better way to illustrate what the departments that are holding strong association, thereby you can improve our promotion mix by launching various loyalty schemes with sales kits, which contain products from these two departments at a competitive price, or you can also take steps to improve the association between departments where you don’t have much penetration.
The following Sankey diagram examples illustrate a strong association among departments within the retail organization. You have drawn this diagram using the Google Visualization Library; you can also create it using S.Draw, Visguy, Fineo, Parallel Sets, Sankey Helper, D3 Sankey Plug-in, etc.
This is widely used in the energy sector to analyze transmission flows and to illustrate anomalies in financial and material flows in business organizations.
How Do You Create A Sankey Diagram?
When creating a Sankey diagram, you can generate unique graphs by specifying the data source.
When creating the diagram, one of the main components that you need to select is the nodes. Various entities (nodes) are defined by text and are referred to as objects. These nodes can either be static or dynamic.
You may even want to add titles, graphics, references, and axis scales. You should know this information while making a Sankey diagram.
A Sankey map is used to represent how a given topic flows through a range of related topics.
When this diagram is drawn, the nodes can be connected by lines to indicate the flow of the topic.
For example, a Sankey diagram might show the flow of electricity through an electrical system. It can be used to display the flow of fluid in a pipeline network.
What Types of Data Can be Visualized with Sankey Diagrams?
These diagrams are an excellent way to visualize complex systems. They can help reveal patterns, aid troubleshooting, identify bottlenecks, and show users how processes flow.
But they aren’t limited to looking at data like that; here is a breakdown of what else can be analyzed with this functional graphic design.
Sankey charts are handy for visualizing data streams because they provide a clear, intuitive representation.
The flow of data through a system, process, or decision process can be analyzed and visualized using a user journey diagram.
When analyzing a situation, it’s often difficult to get to the root of a problem when collecting data from different perspectives.
This diagram can show where the problem exists and how it may affect the overall system.
When Not To Use a Sankey Diagram?
The main issue with using a Sankey diagram is that it’s not always accurate.
Since the diagram's purpose is to illustrate the flow of data in a system, it’s important not to include additional data that would skew the picture. This leads to the next point.
The purpose of this diagram is to illustrate the flow of data within a system, not to depict the user experience. Therefore, it’s important not to include anything other than the information being input into the system.
For example, if you were trying to determine how many people had been placed on a waitlist for an upcoming flight and you added the number of passengers and their seating preferences, you would be adding extraneous data that would skew the diagram and make it less accurate.
It’s important to keep in mind that a Sankey diagram is only as good as the data you are putting into it.
The main problem with this diagram is that it takes the data being input into a system and uses it to determine the visual representation of that data.
There are situations where this is fine, and others when it’s not. The issue with a user analysis diagram is that there will always be outliers in the data (i.e., data that doesn’t fit well into the category being illustrated), and it’s tough to determine which will be outliers.
For example, if you were adding people to a list for a 30-day wait, and then one person was added to the back of the list, it isn’t very easy to tell whether that person is in the waitlist category or just being super slow.
This data is likely to appear as outliers in the Sankey diagram, which is why this type of visual can be ineffective for some information.
Also, in Sankey diagrams, it may be challenging to compare flows with similar values. If you want to, try using stacked bar graphs instead.
Conclusion:
Putting this tool into the hands of the people who know, rather than having a graphic artist in the process, allows users the opportunity to visualize a wide range of methods, such as
- Optimize production costs by easily understanding the process flow.
- Energy losses of a particular machine.
- Material flows within specific economic sectors.
- Improve operational efficiency and support a more sustainable business operation.
- Practical cash flow analysis in business organizations.
Adding your own visual graphics to the Sankey Diagram in Data Visualization provides rich, interactive visualization, resulting in attractive graphics for information materials and compelling visual data exploration!