If you think you’re a data visualisation junkie, it’s likely that you’ve read Edward Tufte’s Visual Display Of Quantitative Information. If you are only a casual observer of the topic, you are likely to have come across these gifs that show you how to clean up a bar graph and a data table. And if…
The problem with spider charts
On FiveThirtyEight, Nate Silver has a piece looking ahead to the Democratic primaries ahead of the presidential elections in the US next year. I don’t know enough about US politics to comment on the piece itself, but what caught my eye is the spider chart describing the various Democratic nominees. This is a standard spider…
Just Plot It
One of my favourite work stories is from this job I did a long time ago. The task given to me was demand forecasting, and the variable I needed to forecast was so “micro” (this intersection that intersection the other) that forecasting was an absolute nightmare. A side effect of this has been that I…
Attractive graphics without chart junk
A picture is worth a thousand words, but ten pictures are worth much less than ten thousand words One of the most common problems with visualisation, especially in the media, is that of “chart junk”. Graphics designers working for newspapers and television channels like to decorate their graphs, to make it more visually appealing. And…
Taking your audience through your graphics
A few weeks back, I got involved in a Twitter flamewar with Shamika Ravi, a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. The object of the argument was a set of gifs she had released to show different aspects of the Indian economy. Admittedly I started the flamewar. Guilty as charged. Thinking about…
New blog on visualisations
For a while now I’ve been commenting on visualisations on Twitter, pointing out the good (and especially bad) graphs. I also have a “chart of the edition” section in my newsletter. Recently, the legendary Krish Ashok suggested that I collect all these bad visualisations in a Tumblr, and I decided to oblige. You can follow…
More on interactive graphics
So for a while now I’ve been building this cricket visualisation thingy. Basically it’s what I think is a pseudo-innovative way of describing a cricket match, by showing how the game ebbs and flows, and marking off the key events. Here’s a sample, from the ongoing game between Chennai Super Kings and Kolkata Knight Riders.…
A banker’s apology
Whenever there is a massive stock market crash, like the one in 1987, or the crisis in 2008, it is common for investment banking quants to talk about how it was a “1 in zillion years” event. This is on account of their models that typically assume that stock prices are lognormal, and that stock…
Levels and shifts in analysing games
So Nitin Pai and Pranay Kotasthane have a great graphic on how India should react to China’s aggressions on Doka La. While the analysis is excellent, my discomfort is with the choice of “deltas” as the axes of this payoff diagram, rather than levels. Source: Nitin Pai and Pranay Kotasthane Instead, what might have been…
When a two-by-two ruins a scatterplot
The BBC has some very good analysis of the Brexit vote (how long back was that?), using voting data at the local authority level, and correlating it with factors such as ethnicity and educational attainment. In terms of educational attainment, there is a really nice chart, that shows the proportion of voters who voted to…
The Art of Drawing Spectacular Graphs
Bloomberg Business has a feature on the decline of the Euro after the Greek “No” vote last night. As you might expect, the feature is accompanied by a graphic which shows a “precipitous fall” in the European currency. I’m in two minds of whether to screenshot the graphic (so that any further changes are not…
Datapukes and Dashboards
Avinash Kaushik has put out an excellent, if long, blog post on building dashboards. A key point he makes is about the difference between dashboards and what he calls “datapukes” (while the name is quite self-explanatory and graphic, it basically refers to a report with a lot of data and little insight). He goes on…