Statistical Graphics and more

Giving a clear separation between presentation graphics and graphics for data exploration is not always easy, because many aspects of the graphics are shared by both types. I very much liked the distinction Antony Unwin gave during one of his latest talks. The difference is quite obvious when you look at the ratio of graphics […]

Pie charts are as popular as entertaining. The latest highlight of chartjunk is here: The pie chart was created by a java code profiling utility which is called checkstyle. I think I can leave it to the reader to find all the points, which go wrong here … the use of transparency is clearly hard to top. Thanks to […]

Books featuring the “Search Inside” option in Amazon also have a concordance (here is a definition) added to the books info. Here are the 100 most frequently used words in Graphics of Large Datasets. Obviously, we are talking about how to “plot large data in figures”. (Pause the mouse over a keyword to see the […]

Here is an example of the so called “Sectioned Density Plot”, which was recently published in “The American Statistician” (Vol 60, No. 2, 167-174). Using a simple histogram, maybe with an added density estimator, and/or a simple standard boxplot for group comparison does the job here. No need to “invent” a new plot, which introduces […]

We got this from Friedrich who is just finishing a sabbatical in Paris: Michael came up with the idea of a challenge. Here’s what he wrote: Here’s a graph you may find interesting, published yesterday in Le Monde. The manifest goal is to compare estimates of les manifestants at les manifestations according to the unions […]

There are many stories and myths about the sinking of the Titanic. We recently compiled the data on the lifeboats (721 passengers who entered a lifeboat) and a nice pattern came out in the fluctuation diagram of “launch sequence no.” against “class”. (female passengers highlighted) The “fate” of the lifeboats is listed under http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/lifeboats/ What […]

The new year starts with a Good & Bad posting … The following figure was taken from: http://www.forbes.com/2005/09/15/hometowns-networths-america-richest_05rich400_map.html © Forbes 2005 and explained by “Each disk represents one of the 400 richest Americans. They are arranged by hometown, and their size represents the person’s wealth:” So this is obviously “The Bad”! The guys who designed […]

This special will track the development of the Tour de France 2005. Using parallel coordinate plots, the stage result, total elapsed time and the current ranking are displayed from day to day.All Stages Stage Results cumulative Time Ranks (click on the images to enlarge) Stage 02: ZANINI, VAN BON and VANSEVENANT fell behind in stage […]

This month’s edition is just perfect to show how NOT to do it! The Bad of the month May is from a talk by Kurt Hornik given at the compstat 2004 meeting in Prague. It looks like follows: This is the famous barley data used in Bill Cleveland’s Visualizing Data many times. Well, on a […]