After a bit more searching, I've discovered that this chart is a variant of
the treemap or map of the market. I'll play around with the sample code
posted here https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-sig-finance/2006q2/000880.html,
but if anyone's taken that further, I'd be keen to know. I'm happy to use
the more conventional box approach than circles and irregular areas.
Sean.

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 11:35 AM, Charilaos Skiadas <cskiadas@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On May 8, 2008, at 9:11 PM, Sean Carmody wrote:
>
>  Does anyone have any ideas about how you could use R to produce a fancy
>> area
>> plot like this one in the NY Times? http://tinyurl.com/6rr22g
>>
>
> I certainly hope not, I wouldn't want my favorite statistics program to
> produce an area graph where the sizes of the areas are not proportional to
> the percentages represented, and where the shapes of the areas are so
> irregular as to make effective area comparisons near impossible...
>
> Unless my eyes are seriously deceiving me, which is quite possible.
>
> It would be interesting however, to find out how such a graph is
> constructed. I wonder if hyperbolic geometry enters the picture.
>
>  Regards,
>> Sean,
>>
>
> Haris Skiadas
> Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
> Hanover College
>
>
>
>
>

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