Part of a whole
Sunburst chart
Shows hierarchy levels as rings, with child sectors subdividing their parents.
- Chart
- Hierarchy
- Composition
What it answers
How do branches subdivide a total?
- Shape
- Concentric hierarchical sectors
- What it shows
- Hierarchy paths and major branches.
Example
The question
How does revenue break down from category to product line?
Revenue by category (inner ring) and product line (outer ring), EUR million
Illustrative data. It belongs to no company.
When to use it
Use it when
Moderate-depth hierarchical composition.
Avoid it when
Many tiny arcs or exact comparison across rings.
How to read it
Read from the centre outward and follow each parent's angular span.
Note
Define how parent totals relate to children.
The data you need
- Layout
- Parent-child table
- Fields
- NodeID: text; ParentID: text/blank; Label: text; Value: number when size is encoded
- One row is
- One node in a parent-child hierarchy. What is the grain?
- Rules
- Node IDs must be unique. Parents must exist. Reject cycles. Define leaf-only versus inclusive parent values.
- Optional
- Alternative: Level1,Level2...,Value. Tree diagrams can omit Value.
- Preparation
- Validate unique node IDs, parent links, roots and absence of cycles. For size-encoded hierarchies, state whether totals are leaf-only or inclusive.
- Units
- Tree levels and branch position are structural. Size-encoded components use a named value unit; parent shares divide by the chosen parent total.
Worked example
Root 100 splits A60, B40; A splits 20 and 40. The two outer A sectors together coverA's 60% angle.
| NodeID | ParentID | Label | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| root | All | 100 | |
| a | root | A | 60 |
| b | root | B | 40 |