After 20 games played, Liverpool are sitting pretty on top of the Premier League with 58 points (out of a possible 60). The only jitter in the campaign so far came in a draw away at Manchester United. I made what I think is a cool graph to put this performance in perspective. I looked…
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…
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…
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…