Plotting the signal or the noise

Antonio alerted me to the following graphic that appeared in the Economist. This is a playful (?) attempt to draw attention to racism in the game of football (soccer).

The analyst proposed that non-white players have played better in stadiums without fans due to Covid19 in 2020 because they have not been distracted by racist abuse from fans, using Italy's Serie A as the case study.

The chart struggles to bring out this finding. There are many lines that criss-cross. The conclusion is primarily based on the two thick lines - which show the average performance with and without fans of white and non-white players. The blue line (non-white) inched to the right (better performance) while the red line (white) shifted slightly to the left.

If the reader wants to understand the chart fully, there's a lot to take in. All (presumably) players are ranked by the performance score from lowest to highest into ten equally sized tiers (known as "deciles"). They are sorted by the 2019 performance when fans were in the stadiums. Each tier is represented by the average performance score of its members. These are the values shown on the top axis labeled "with fans".

Then, with the tiers fixed, the players are rated in 2020 when stadiums were empty. For each tier, an average 2020 performance score is computed, and compared to the 2019 performance score.

The following chart reveals the structure of the data:

The players are lined up from left to right, from the worst performers to the best. Each decile is one tenth of the players, and is represented by the average score within the tier. The vertical axis is the actual score while the horizontal axis is a relative ranking - so we expect a positive correlation.

The blue line shows the 2019 (with fans) data, which are used to determine tier membership. The gray dotted line is the 2020 (no fans) data - because they don't decide the ranking, it's possible that the average score of a lower tier (e.g. tier 3 for non-whites) is higher than the average score of a higher tier (e.g. tier 4 for non-whites).

What do we learn from the graphic?

It's very hard to know if the blue and gray lines are different by chance or by whether fans were in the stadium. The maximum gap between the lines is not quite 0.2 on the raw score scale, which is roughly a one-decile shift. It'd be interesting to know the variability of the score of a given player across say 5 seasons prior to 2019. I suspect it could be more than 0.2. In any case, the tiny shifts in the averages (around 0.05) can't be distinguished from noise.

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This type of analysis is tough to do. Like other observational studies, there are multiple problems of biases and confounding. Fan attendance was not the only thing that changed between 2019 and 2020. The score used to rank players is a "Fantacalcio algorithmic match-level fantasy-football score." It's odd that real-life players should be judged by their fantasy scores rather than their on-the-field performance.

The causal model appears to assume that every non-white player gets racially abused. At least, the analyst didn't look at the curves above and conclude, post-hoc, that players in the third decile are most affected by racial abuse - which is exactly what has happened with the observational studies I have featured on the book blog recently.

Being a Serie A fan, I happen to know non-white players are a small minority so the error bars are wider, which is another issue to think about. I wonder if this factor by itself explains the shifts in those curves. The curve for white players has a much higher sample size thus season-to-season fluctuations are much smaller (regardless of fans or no fans).

 

 

 

 

Stumped by the ATM

The neighborhood bank recently installed brand new ATMs, with tablet monitors and all that jazz. Then, I found myself staring at this screen:

I wanted to withdraw $100. I ordinarily love this banknote picker because I can get the $5, $10, $20 notes, instead of $50 and $100 that come out the slot when I don't specify my preference.

Something changed this time. I find myself wondering which row represents which note. For my non-U.S. readers, you may not know that all our notes are the same size and color. The screen resolution wasn't great and I had to squint really hard to see the numbers of those banknote images.

I suppose if I grew up here, I might be able to tell the note values from the figureheads. This is an example of a visualization that makes my life harder!

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I imagine that the software developer might be a foreigner. I imagine the developer might live in Europe. In this case, the developer might have this image in his/her head:

Euro banknotes are heavily differentiated - by color, by image, by height and by width. The numeric value also occupies a larger proportion of the area. This makes a lot of sense.

I like designs to be adaptable. Switching data from one country to another should not alter the design. Switching data at different time scales should not affect the design. This banknote picker UI is not adaptable across countries.

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Once I figured out the note values, I learned another reason why I couldn't tell which row is which note. It's because one note is absent.

Where is the $10 note? That and the twenty are probably the most frequently used. I am also surprised people want $1 notes from an ATM. But I assume the bank knows something I don't.

Tip of the day: transform data before plotting

The Financial Times called out a twitter user for some graphical mischief. Here are the two charts illustrating the plunge in Bitcoin's price last week : (Hat tip to Mark P.)

There are some big differences between the two charts. The left chart depicts this month's price actions, drawing attention to the last week while the right chart shows a longer period of time, starting from 2012. The author of the tweet apparently wanted to say that the recent drop is nothing to worry about. 

The Financial Times reporter noted another subtle difference - the right chart uses a log scale while the left chart is linear. Specifically, it's a log 2 scale, which means that each step up is double the previous number (1, 2, 4, 8, etc.). The effect is to make large changes look smaller. Presumably most readers fail to notice the scale. Even if they do, it's not natural to assign different differences to the same physical distances.

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These price charts always miss the mark. That's because the current price is insufficient to capture whether a Bitcoin investor made money or lost money. If you purchased Bitcoins this month, you lost money. If your purchase was a year ago, you still made quite a bit of money despite the recent price plunge.

The following chart should not be read as a time series, even though the horizontal axis is time. Think date of Bitcoin purchase. This chart tells you how much $1 of Bitcoin is worth last week, based on what day the purchase was made.

People who bought this year have mostly been in the red. Those who purchased before October 2020 and held on are still very pleased with their decision.

This example illustrates that simple transformations of the raw data yield graphics that are much more informative.

 

Did the pandemic drive mass migration?

The Wall Street Journal ran this nice compact piece about migration patterns during the pandemic in the U.S. (link to article)

I'd look at the chart on the right first. It shows the greatest net flow of people out of the Northeast to the South. This sankey diagram is nicely done. The designer shows restraint in not printing the entire dataset on the chart. If a reader really cares about the net migration from one region to a specific other region, it's easy to estimate the number even though it's not printed.

The maps succinctly provide readers the definition of the regions.

To keep things in perspective, we are talking around 100,000 when the death toll of Covid-19 is nearing 600,000. Some people have moved but almost everyone else haven't.

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The chart on the left breaks down the data in a different way - by urbanicity. This is a variant of the stacked column chart. It is a chart form that fits the particular instance of the dataset. It works only because in every month of the last three years, there was a net outflow from "large metro cores". Thus, the entire series for large metro cores can be pointed downwards.

The fact that this design is sensitive to the dataset is revealed in the footnote, which said that the May 2018 data for "small/medium metro" was omitted from the chart. Why didn't they plot that number?

It's the one datum that sticks out like a sore thumb. It's the only negative number in the entire dataset that is not associated with "large metro cores". I suppose they could have inserted a tiny medium green slither in the bottom half of that chart for May 2018. I don't think it hurts the interpretation of the chart. Maybe the designer thinks it might draw unnecessary attention to one data point that really doesn't warrant it.

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See my collection of posts about Wall Street Journal graphics.