{"id":138,"date":"2009-05-15T22:32:32","date_gmt":"2009-05-15T20:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/?p=138"},"modified":"2010-05-05T21:59:40","modified_gmt":"2010-05-05T19:59:40","slug":"dont-call-me-marimekko","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/dont-call-me-marimekko\/","title":{"rendered":"Don&#8217;t call me &#8220;Marimekko&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/junkcharts.typepad.com\/junk_charts\/2009\/05\/spinning-multicolor-2.html\" target=\"_blank\">post<\/a> on Junk Charts caught my attention. It is the mosaic plot version of the greenhouse gas chart which was initially a <a href=\"http:\/\/junkcharts.typepad.com\/.a\/6a00d8341e992c53ef01157080b2fd970b-pi\">pie chart<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Mosaic Excel\" src=\"http:\/\/junkcharts.typepad.com\/.a\/6a00d8341e992c53ef01156f8d3713970c-pi\" alt=\"Mosaic Excel\" width=\"512\" height=\"364\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This is maybe one of the best counter examples for mosaic plots.<\/p>\n<p>It is not hard to explain why a &#8220;traditional&#8221; mosaic plot completely fails to visualize this kind of data:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>there are eight levels for the second category<\/li>\n<li>many of the cells are (almost) not filled<\/li>\n<li>there are only two variables in the plot<\/li>\n<li>(there are no gaps between the variables)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In short, traditional mosaic plots work best when we want to visualize <strong>associations<\/strong> between a few categorical variables with few empty cells &#8211; to just display a &#8220;simple&#8221; table, variants of mosaic plots are definitely the better choice.<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s come back to the actual data in the example. Here is a screen shot of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rosuda.org\/Mondrian\" target=\"_blank\">Mondrian<\/a> session showing two barcharts and a multiple barchart of the data:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.theusRus.de\/Blog-files\/greenhouse.png\" alt=\"Mondrian session\" width=\"636\" height=\"700\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Whereas the sources are relatively uniformly distributed, the gases are clearly dominated by CO_2. Crossing the two variables reveals that half of the cells are empty, which is the reason why a mosaic plot has a hard time to show the data.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Source&#8217; is sorted according to the absolute share of CO_2, such that the multiple barchart is easier to read. Looking at the three largest CO_2 sources we find that these categories make up exactly 50% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theusRus.de\/Blog-files\/GreenhouseGases.txt\">data<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Only three sources (as highlighted) generate at least two kinds of gases in reasonable quantities.<\/p>\n<p>It is always a good idea to discuss visualization ideas with real data which we actually want to analyze and understand &#8211; as with the greenhouse data here &#8211; and not just play around with artificial data as we find <a href=\"http:\/\/learnr.wordpress.com\/2009\/03\/29\/ggplot2_marimekko_mosaic_chart\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/peltiertech.com\/WordPress\/marimekko-charts\/\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>. This seems also to be the source of the Marimekko &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post on Junk Charts caught my attention. It is the mosaic plot version of the greenhouse gas chart which was initially a pie chart. This is maybe one of the best counter examples for mosaic plots. It is not hard to explain why a &#8220;traditional&#8221; mosaic plot completely fails to visualize this kind of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-reference"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":149,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138\/revisions\/149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}