chordbb - Building Blocks for Chord Plots

DISCLAIMER: This project is work in progress and does not yet provide everything needed to produce publication-ready chord plots. Thus, use at own risk.

Introduction

chordbb provides building blocks to generate custom chord plots. While there exist other solutions to draw chord diagrams using python and in particular matplotlib (see further below), chordbb has a special focus on customization. That is, chordbb does not assume a one-size-fits-all style for chord diagrams but rather assumes that a user wants to heavily customize the end result.

Installation

At the moment, chordbb is not yet available on PyPI. To install it, you therefore need to download or clone this repository and then use pip or another python package manager. Example:

$ git clone https://github.com/nwaniek/matplotlib-chordbb.git
$ cd matplotlib-chordbb
$ pip install .

In the future, meaning as soon as chordbb is available on PyPI, you can install it by simply running

$ pip install matplotlib-chordbb

Usage

A basic example on how to use chordbb is provided in the file example.py, which was used to generate the figure above.

Extending chordbb

chordbb is kept as simple as possible while also being flexible. Specifically, chordbb internally fills a dictionary for each segment that might be plottet. This dictionary contains information, such as where the segment starts and ends, as well as other values. If you want to develop a custom renderer for a segment, you only need to implement a function that takes an axis and a segment, and then renders what you want to display. For an example of this, have a look at one of the existing renderes, e.g. ChordArcAxisTicker.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you have suggestions, bug reports, or want to contribute code, please open an issue or submit a pull request on GitHub, or send an e-mail.

Alternatives

Of course, there exist alternatives to chordbb. For instance, the excellent mpl-chord-diagram, which is feature rich and stable. The benefit of chordbb over other solutions is an improved level of customization.

License

chordbb is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.