Statistical Graphics and more

Given the trouble I got into after my post on the Japan earthquake, I probably should stay put when it comes to looking at data on hazardous events … More seriously, as statistician (or data analyst in general) we often lack the expertise from the domain expert, who usually collected the data. Today, in a [...]

… which is usually Merry Christmas around here and some (still too few) Happy Chanukah. I had a good laugh when I saw Andrew’s reference to this barchart. Maybe this is the right way to teach upper management the concept of uncertainty via confidence intervals, as the concept of mistrust is surely well known in [...]

Following the news and trying to understand what is going on in the “EU debt crisis” is a hard job and maybe a good visualization can help. At first sight the BBC did it. Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom? shows nicely how the relation between the most “interesting” debtors and creditors in the [...]

It’s been a while since Georgios sent me the link to this interesting “psychogram” of iOS users vs. Android users. In the first place I thought the really bad thing (but maybe also amusing thing) of this “analysis” is the fact that some sample has been pushed through some multivariate statistical procedure and generated some [...]

Mosaic Plots are the swiss army knife of categorical data displays. Whereas bar charts are stuck in their univariate limits, mosaic plots and their variants open up the powerful visualization of multivariate categorical data. But let’s start with an introductory example. The Titanic data is still the most convincing application of mosaic plots, though many [...]

This time it is easy to make a point; not because of my improvement advise being so well thought and fine tuned – no, just because “The Bad” is so convincingly bad. You find it here at slideshare, called “The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report”. Figure 1 on page 10 looks like this: I would [...]

The current issue of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter features two invited articles, which both look at the “graphical display of quantitative data” – one from the perspective of statistical graphics, and one from the perspective of information visualization. Robert Kosara writes from an InfoVis view:  Visualization: It’s More than Pictures! Information visualization is [...]

Mr. Beck’s London Tube map is a real design classic. Besides the timeless and universal design, the chosen geographical distortion has always been a point of discussion. At fourthway [via infosthetics] we find a nice animation between the “real map”, which is geographically correct and the stylized map, which is optimized for reading and aesthetics. Here [...]

Thanks to the data provided by the USGS, we can take a look at all earthquakes since 1973, which cover almost the last 40 years of earthquake activity worldwide. Let’s first take a look at the yearly development of the earthquake activity overall: The apparent increase in the last 10 years is striking – though [...]

This post could as well be called “Which Smartphone is right for you?”, or “Plotting conditional distribution – but the right way!”. Here is the original visualization from Nielsen, which is not really bad, but still hides the important message to some extent. Kaiser adequately pointed out that some features – important features – of [...]

This is the ideal post to combine Infographics/Visualizations with the user interface aspect. I found it on Kaiser’s Junk Charts. Having spent only a few years of my life in the US and being inculturated in orderly and standardized Germany, I can tell that most faucets here come pretty close to the “should be” situation. This [...]

I feel ashamed for this boring title, but hope that the entry can make up for it. This visualization did inspire me, as a comment did point to my Tour de France visualizations. As with all visualizations, we need data first – this sounds trivial, but is sometimes a frustrating show-stopper. After I found the [...]