Statistical Graphics and more

Peter Huber referred to “the rawness of raw data”, a kind of data we would not expect to find in a textbook. The book of Fahrmeir and Tutz on multivariate modelling refers to the visual impairment data from Liang et al., 1992 in table 3.12: Nothing wrong here at first sight; but how would you […]

On an Apple related list I found a pointer to this price comparison chart. Although the author already put a disclaimer in his post that this graph was not intended to be “mathematically correct”, it is amazing how badly the actually information is hidden behind the rainbow chart. Using a simple barchart just does not […]

After getting the data together which was used to generate the visualization criticized in this post, it is just fair to prepare a better version. Tom Carden already showed some quick graphs which improve the initial “pie chart“. Note that I only show the 7 most relevant diseases and grouped the rest into one group […]

Robert has a very long and profound post on this chart: The whole interactive thing can be found here on the GE site. It seems to be a bit of a provocation that Ben Fry’s company uses a tattered pie chart to visualize the data, which is definitely better visualized in a line-chart (i.e., a […]

This time it is easy for me, as I just need to point to the interesting discussion at Junk Charts. The original graphics is from the NYT: The “improved” plot looks like this: The advantages of the box-plot view (from Junkcharts) The European market is much more fragmented than the U.S. market. The Big 2 […]

Antony pointed me to this nice example found on BBC News. So what is the message here? “Chinese and other foreigners (not being British nationals) more and more fill Brirish jails …” Well, as we look at the percentage changes, we do not have any clue about the underlying group sizes. As whites are by […]

Haven’t we been preaching against 3-d barcharts and the like for a long time? Here is what we didn’t think of in our wildest dreams: an animated 3-d barchart! As you might guess, this is the usage statistics from this blog over the last week. It is not hard to draw “The Good” (far less […]

This time no fancy graph, but a nice example of “less can be more”. I took this month’s example from the R Graph Gallery. Here’s “The Bad”: Above graphics tries to depict a r by s table in a 3-d view. Uwe’s example has several problems The 3-d view make a judgement of the heights […]

Yes, it has been a while since I posted a “Good & Bad” … But as I saw this “novel decision tree plot” on an advertisement by C&H for Paul’s R Graphics book, I got inspired again … Now here is “The Bad”: Let me explain, what went wrong with the R graphics: A tree, […]

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 […]

Two examples of plotting geographical information. The first ”The Bad” is from ”Informationen zur politischen Bildung, No. 285″ (Information for political education) and gives a very good example how badly human perception works for judging the area of a circle The second “The Good” is from the 19th century and shows a map of several […]