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.

ensembles parallèles

Flux entre catégories de plusieurs variables qualitatives.

Dérivés des coordonnées parallèles par Bendix, Kosara et Hauser (2005). Au sens large, l'usage les range parmi les diagrammes alluviaux.

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

Attestation

French term: Lagnel, Manuel de datavisualisation, Dunod, 2021

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 (11)

45 occurrences in the corpus; indexed by 2 books

Show the 11 sources

Cite this entry

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

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