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  RFE: Heat Maps / Tree Maps
Posted by Garen on Jul-01-2009 11:57
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I'd really like to see Heat Maps / Tree Maps in Chart Director.  It helps to quickly see, at a glance, the significance of some data by the size and shading inside the chart, and is nice to have for drill-downs.

Some examples:
http://www.dundas.com/Gallery/Flash/Chart/Other/index.aspx?filename=Chart_2D_Heat_Map.png
http://help.infragistics.com/Help/NetAdvantage/NET/2008.2/CLR2.0/html/Chart_About_2D_Heat_Map_Charts.html
http://www.codeplex.com/reflectoraddins/Wiki/View.aspx?title=CodeMetrics&referringTitle=Home

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/10-lessons-treemap-design/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/tourdeflex/web/#sampleId=14600

  Re: RFE: Heat Maps / Tree Maps
Posted by Peter Kwan on Jul-02-2009 02:31
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Hi Garen,

Thanks a lot for your suggestion. We will certainly consider this type of chart in future versions of ChartDirector.

Regards
Peter Kwan

  Re: RFE: Heat Maps / Tree Maps
Posted by Jerry Merrill on Sep-02-2009 00:08
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Attachments:
The heat maps that are mentioned above are business/financial rather than scientific, which is what you added in Vers 5.0.  Some of the heat maps identified in the links are very sophisticated, because they create boxes that don't always line up vertically and horizontally. I found a simpler heat map that is like a percentage bar chart, but each of the bars is a different width. I think this would be easier to implement. (I cannot remember the link so I have attached a bitmap).
Heat map.gif

  Re: RFE: Heat Maps / Tree Maps
Posted by Peter Kwan on Sep-02-2009 01:58
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Hi Jerry,

The "heat map" is not a standard terminology, and it means different things to different people. In ChartDirector, it means a chart of the nature z = f(x, y), in which the z value is represented by colors. We also called this a "coutour map".

In the links in this thread, some of the charts are really "tree maps". In a tree map, the position of the boxes have no meaning. It is analoguous to slices in a pie chart, in which their angular positions have no meaning (only their sizes have meaning).

The key part of the tree map is an algorithm to partition the data into a tree of boxes. It is analogous to a pie chart which partition the pie into slices, but the partitioning of a tree map is more complicated.

The colors of the boxes in a tree map is like the colors of the slices in a pie chart. It is just a classification of the boxes.

For your attached chart, it looks like a kind of stacked chart. There are many methods to create this chart. Some examples are:

(a) You may use multiple layers of "Variable Width Bar Chart" to create a stacked effect. (See the sample code "Variable Width Bar Chart" for a one layer variable width bar chart.)

(b) You can create it as a "stacked area chart".

(c) You can use multiple step lines (added using addStepLineLayer) to draw the boundaries between the colors, and fill the region in between the step lines using inter-line layers (addInterLineLayer).

Hope this can help.

Regards
Peter Kwan