Top N + others

Top N answers questions such as Customers contributing to the most revenue, Spend Categories that consume most of the budget, etc.

In this section, let us see how the Top N feature works in Inforiver.

Consider the example of displaying the Top 2 categories that generated maximum Revenue.

a) Select the Revenue column.

b) In the 'Home' tab of the toolbar, select 'Top n' from the 'Analyze' section. The Top N dialog box appears. Fill in the details to filter the Top 2 categories. Click 'Apply'.

To show the top 2% of items, just change the selection ‘Value’ to ‘Percentage’.

c) You can see the top 2 categories with the remaining categories grouped under 'Others'. It also indicates how many items are a part of the 'Others' row.

d) Hover over the 'Others' row to see a preview of the items grouped under Others. Click on the expand icon to view all the categories that have been classified as Others. This will display all the categories under 'Others' in a separate window.

1. Nested rules

a) To do a nested Top N, like the bottom 3 sub-categories in each of the top 2 categories, you can create multiple rules by clicking ‘Add rule’ and filling in the fields as shown. Click 'Apply'.

b) The above setup displays the following output. Note that the 'Others' row is available for categories and subcategories.

2. Multi-level nested rules

a) You can increase the number of hierarchy levels even beyond two (2). Add rules as below to configure the third category.

This configuration gives the following output.

3. Suffix ‘Others’

When using the multi-level and nested Top N implementation, it may not be clear as to what a specific 'Others' row refers to.

To address this, Inforiver provides an option that appends the category name to 'Others' for each instance of others, except the one at the outer-most level.

To delete a Top N condition, click on the 'Delete' icon. To clear all the Top N conditions, click on 'Reset all'.

A warning message is displayed when you try to apply Top N on more than one column/measure. You need to remove the existing filter and apply a new one to the selected column by clicking on 'Remove and proceed'.

4. Modifying the Others bucket

Inforiver offers multiple options to add or remove items from the 'Others' bucket.

To add or remove rows from the Others bucket, click on the row gripper and select the 'Add row to others' or 'Remove from others' option.

a) For data that is not hierarchical, select the 'current category' option.

b) For data that is hierarchical and contains the same element at different levels, you have 2 options:

To add or remove a particular element from its immediate parent, select 'Current Category'.
To add or remove a particular element from all levels which contain that element, select 'All Category'.

You can also highlight rows that are manually added or removed from the Others bucket. You can enable the 'Highlight add/remove rows -TopN' from the Misc tab in display settings.

If you are adding rows to the Others bucket, Inforiver generates a notification that will direct you to the Highlight rows setting.

You can also apply additional customizations such as setting a custom background and border color for rows that are removed or added to the Others bucket.

In the next section, we'll be covering sorting & reordering data.