Statistics report raises mixed emotions

It's gratifying to live through the incredible rise of statistics as a discipline. In a recent report by the American Statistical Association (ASA), we learned that enrollment at all levels (bachelor, master and doctorate) has exploded in the last 5-10 years, as "Big Data" gather momentum.

But my sense of pride takes a hit while looking at the charts that appear in the report. These graphs demonstrate again the hegemony of Excel defaults in the world of data visualization.

Here are all five charts organized in a panel:

Chart #5 (bottom right) catches the eye because it is the only chart with two lines instead of three. You then flip to the prior page to find the legend. The legend tells you the red line is Bachelor and the green line is PhD. That seems wrong, unless biostats departments do not give out Master degrees.

This is confirmed by chart #2, where we find the blue line (Master) hugging zero.

Presumably the designer removed the blue line from chart #5 because the low counts mean that it fluctuates wildly between 0 and 100 percent and so disrupts the visual design. But the designer forgets to tell readers why the blue line is missing.

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It turns out the article itself contradicts all of the above:

For biostatistics degrees, for which NCES started providing data specifically in 1992, master’s degrees track the overall increase from 2010– 2014 at 47%...The number of undergraduate degrees in biostatistics remains below 30.

In other words, the legend is mislabeled. The blue line represents Bachelor while the red line, Master. (The error was noticed after the print edition went out because the online version has the correct legend.)

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There is another mystery. Charts #2, #3, and #5, all dealing with biostats, have time starting from 1992, while Charts #1 and #4 starts from 1987. The charts aren't lined up in a way that would allow comparisons across time.

Similarly, the vertical scale of each chart is different (aside from Charts #3 and #4). This design choice impairs comparison across charts.

In the article, it is explained that 1992 was when the agency started collecting data about biostatistics degrees. Between 1987 and 1992, were there no biostatistics majors? were biostatistics majors lumped into the counts of statistics majors? It's hard to tell.

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While Excel is a powerful tool that has served our community well, its flexibility is often a source of errors. The remedy to this problem is to invest ample time in over-riding pretty much every default decision in the system.

For example:

This chart, a reproduction of Chart #1 above, was entirely produced in Excel.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Ken]

I find 2 very odd, as I thought that many more students would do a masters in biostatistics as it is a requirement for consulting work. The lowest level may be biostatistics undergraduate degrees which aren't very common, unlike for statistics. That would then leave green as masters degrees in biostatistics.