I recently started working at Stanford, and have gotten the opportunity to look at lots of interesting data.  Thanks to the awesome example at http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/4348373, I started implementing the zoomable sunburst partition layout.  Eventually, I ran into a problem.  Very large numbers were being drawn to the total value of their children, even when that sum was a small fraction of the total (due to a large numbers of “others,” which were not included in the dataset).

I wanted all the nodes to render to their own scaled value, and allow the children to only take a portion of their parents’ sizes.  After reading about the problem at https://github.com/mbostock/d3/pull/574, I went about implementing the “dummy node” solution.  I’ll post my solution, shortly.