Motivated by a tweet from Tony Hirst (http://blog.ouseful.info/), I started experimenting with an rCharts implementation of the d3 sankey plugin. While I was putting together examples, I found lots of gaps in my knowledge of sankeys and network analysis. I did not want to let good learning go to waste, so I put together this quick tutorial documenting what I learned. Click here or on the screenshot below to see it.
For those wondering how this might be useful in finance, sankeys could be employed well in Portfolio Appraisal/Holdings type reports where nodes represent household, client accounts, asset classes, and security types. Edge weight would be $ or % in each.
