Diagram: parallel sets — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

Explanatory diagram: parallel sets — Drawing: Adrien Taudière (CC0)

chart

parallel sets

Flows between the categories of several categorical variables.

Classification

chart
flows › ribbon flows
flow, part-to-whole

Channels

length; main: count of each level and each flow
area; secondary: count of each level and each flow
spatial region; main: variable and category
color hue; secondary: category

Variants

alluvial plotgapless blocks in the same order

Scientific literature

OpenAlex: 717 papers since 1959, 16% in the last five years; mostly in Computer Science, Engineering, Earth and Planetary Sciences

Seminal references

invention (2005) Bendix, Kosara & Hauser (2005). Parallel sets: visual analysis of categorical data. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (59 citations)
formalization (2006) Kosara et al. (2006). Parallel Sets: interactive exploration and visual analysis of categorical data. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (268 citations)

R packages

R ggforce::geom_parallel_sets(); GitHub 958 stars; last commit 2025-09

R code of the ggplot2 example

library(ggplot2)
library(ggforce)
library(dplyr)
library(palmerpenguins)

sets <- penguins |>
  filter(!is.na(sex)) |>
  count(island, species, sex) |>
  gather_set_data(1:3) |>
  mutate(x = factor(x, levels = c("island", "species", "sex"), labels = c("Island", "Species", "Sex")))

p <- ggplot(sets, aes(x = x, id = id, split = y, value = n)) +
  geom_parallel_sets(aes(fill = species), alpha = 0.6, axis.width = 0.36) +
  geom_parallel_sets_axes(axis.width = 0.36, fill = "#535353") +
  geom_parallel_sets_labels(colour = "white", angle = 0, size = 2.8) +
  scale_x_discrete(position = "top", expand = expansion(add = 0.2)) +
  labs(title = "Gentoo live on Biscoe only, Chinstrap on Dream only",
       subtitle = "Penguins of known sex, by island, species and sex",
       x = NULL, y = NULL,
       caption = "Data: palmerpenguins (Horst, Hill & Gorman 2020)") +
  theme_lex_viz(grid = "", arrows = "") +
  theme(legend.position = "none", axis.text.y = element_blank(),
        axis.text.x = element_text(face = "bold"))

Sources (9)

45 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 2 books

Cite this entry

Stable addresshttps://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/parallel-sets.html

ReferenceTaudière Adrien. 2026. parallel sets. In Visualization Vocabulary, version 1.0.0. IdEst. https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/parallel-sets.html

BibTeX

@incollection{taudiere2026-parallel-sets,
  author    = {Taudière, Adrien},
  title     = {parallel sets},
  booktitle = {Visualization Vocabulary},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {1.0.0},
  publisher = {IdEst},
  url       = {https://dataviz.adrientaudiere.com/en-only/term/parallel-sets.html},
  note      = {CC0 1.0}
}

Page created on 2026-10-13. Text last changed on 2026-11-10. Images last changed on 2026-11-11. Numbers computed on 2026-10-22.