Statistical Graphics and more

In an age where “data is the new oil” (a controversial claim, worth its own post …) there is data everywhere, i.e., data is collected more and more automatically, be it by smartphones, cameras, or social networks sucking up people’s privacy. Having all this data at hand, opens up the possibility to visualize things we […]

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster and it is all over in the media – ranging from movies to serious reportage. Having worked on visualization of categorical data visualization for a long time, the Titanic data became somewhat like “the mother of all demo datasets” and may be boring people by now […]

Some weeks ago I was browsing through the categories of TED Talks and was surprised to find an entry on statistics – which is regraded to be a very boring topic by most people. The talk I chose to watch was by Nic Marks – as I tried to avoid yet another Hans Rosling talk. […]

On the JMP blog you find a post which uses the same data source I took for my first attempt to visualize the web of the EU debt. I found it hard to really make a point with this data. Looking at the JMP post tells me I wasn’t all too bad. Let’s walk through […]

Looking for a map of the french Departments, I came across this map of the population density of France on Departments level which can be found on Wikipedia – and you may guess: this is this month’s “The Bad”. At first sight there seems to be a contradiction between the apparently continuous color scale (see […]

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 […]