Kenneth Tay takes a look at a sunflower plot:
A sunflower plot is a type of scatterplot which tries to reduce overplotting. When there are multiple points that have the same
(x, y)values, sunflower plots plot just one point there, but has little edges (or “petals”) coming out from the point to indicate how many points are really there.
My first thought on it is that it’s too busy and doesn’t do its job of portraying a mass of data points very well. When you have just a few observations, then yeah, it’s not too bad. But once you have any reasonable amount of density on the plot, it’s better to use jitter and transparency (as Kenneth points out). H/T R-bloggers