Working with multiple dimensions, an example from Germany

An anonymous reader submitted this mirrored bar chart about violent acts by extremists in the 16 German states.

At first glance, this looks like a standard design. On a second look, you might notice what the reader discovered- the chart used two different scales, one for each side. The left side (red) depicting left-wing extremism is artificially compressed relative to the right side (blue). Not sure if this reflects the political bias of the publication - but in any case, this distortion means the only way to consume this chart is to read the numbers.

Even after fixing the scales, this design is challenging for the reader. It's unnatural to compare two years by looking first below then above. It's not simple to compare across states, and even harder to compare left- and right-wing extremism (due to mirroring).

The chart feels busy because the entire dataset is printed on it. I appreciate not including a redundant horizontal axis. (I wonder if the designer first removed the axis, then edited the scale on one side, not realizing the distortion.) Another nice touch, hidden in the legend, is the country totals.

I present two alternatives.

The first is a small-multiples "bumps chart".

Each plot presents the entire picture within a state. You can see the general level of violence, the level of left- and right-wing extremism, and their year-on-year change. States can be compared holistically.

Several German state names are rather long, so I explored a horizontal orientation. In this case, a connected dot plot may be more appropriate.

The sign of a good multi-dimensional visual display is whether readers can easily learn complex relationships. Depending on the question of interest, the reader can mentally elevate parts of this chart. One can compare the set of blue arrows to the set of red arrows, or focus on just blue arrows pointing right, or red arrows pointing left, or all arrows for Berlin, etc.

 

[P.S. Anonymous reader said the original chart came from the Augsburger newspaper. This link in German contains more information.]

Cornell must remove the logs before it reopens the campus in the fall

Against all logic, Cornell announced last week it would re-open in the fall because a mathematical model under development by several faculty members and grad students predicts that a "full re-opening" would lead to 80 percent fewer infections than a scenario of full virtual instruction. That's what was reported by the media.

The model is complicated, with loads of assumptions, and the report is over 50 pages long. I will put up my notes on how they attained this counterintuitive result in the next few days. The bottom line is - and the research team would agree - it is misleading to describe the analysis as "full re-open" versus "no re-open". The so-called full re-open scenario assumes the entire community including students, faculty and staff submit to a full program of test-trace-isolate, including (mandatory) PCR diagnostic testing once every five days throughout the 16-week semester, and immediate quarantine and isolation of new positive cases, as well as those in contact with such persons, plus full compliance with this program. By contrast, it assumes students do not get tested in the online instruction scenario. In other words, the researchers expect Cornell to get done what the U.S. governments at all levels failed to do until now.

[7/8/2020: The post on the Cornell model is now up on the book blog. Here.]

The report takes us back to the good old days of best-base-worst-case analysis. There is no data for validating such predictions so they performed sensitivity analyses, defined as changing one factor at a time assuming all other factors are fixed at "nominal" (i.e. base case) values. In a large section of the report, they publish a series of charts of the following style:

Each line here represents one of the best-base-worst cases (respectively, orange-blue-green). Every parameter except one is given the "nominal" value (which represents the base case). The parameter that is manpulated is shown on the horizontal axis, and for the above chart, the variable is the assumption of average number of daily contacts per person. The vertical axis shows the main outcome variable, which is the percentage of the community infected by the end of term.

This flatness of the lines in the above chart appears to say that the outcome is quite insensitive to the change in the average daily contact rate under all three scenarios - until the daily contact rises above 10 per person per day. It also appears to show that the blue line is roughly midway between the orange and the green so the percent infected is slightly less-than halved under the optimistic scenario, and a bit more than doubled under the pessimistic scenario, relative to the blue line.

Look again.

The vertical axis is presented in log scale, and only labeled at values 1% and 10%. About midway between 1 and 10 on the horizontal axis, the outcome value has already risen above 10%. Because of the log transformation, above 10%, each tick represents an increase of 10% in proportion. So, the top of the vertical axis indicates 80% of the community being infected! Nothing in the description or labeling of the vertical axis prepares the reader for this.

The report assumes a fixed value for average daily contacts of 8 (I rounded the number for discussion), which is invariable across all three scenarios. Drawing a vertical line about eight-tenths of the way towards 10 appears to signal that this baseline daily contact rate places the outcome in the relatively flat part of the curve.

Look again.

The horizontal axis too is presented in log scale. To birth one log-scale may be regarded as a misfortune; to birth two log scales looks like carelessness. 

Since there exists exactly one tick beyond 10 on the horizontal axis, the right-most value is 20. The model has been run for values of average daily contacts from 1 to 20, with unit increases. I can think of no defensible reason why such a set of numbers should be expressed in a log scale.

For the vertical axis, the outcome is a proportion, which is confined to within 0 percent and 100 percent. It's not a number that can explode.

***

Every log scale on a chart is birthed by its designer. I know of no software that automatically performs log transforms on data without the user's direction. (I write this line with trepidation wishing that I haven't planted a bad idea in some software developer's head.)

Here is what the shape of the original data looks like - without any transformation. All software (I'm using JMP here) produces something of this type:

At the baseline daily contact rate value of 8, the model predicts that 3.5% of the Cornell community will get infected by the end of the semester (again, assuming strict test-trace-isolate fully implemented and complied).  Under the pessimistic scenario, the proportion jumps to 14%, which is 4 or 5 times higher than the base case. In this worst-case scenario, if the daily contact rate were about twice the assumed value (just over 16), half of the community would be infected in 16 weeks!

I actually do not understand how there could only be 8 contacts per person per day when the entire student body has returned to 100% in-person instruction. (In the report, they even say the 8 contacts could include multiple contacts with the same person.) I imagine an undergrad student in a single classroom with 50 students. This assumption says the average student in this class only comes into contact with at most 8 of those. That's one class. How about other classes? small tutorials? dining halls? dorms? extracurricular activities? sports? parties? bars?

Back to graphics. Something about the canonical chart irked the report writers so they decided to try a log scale. Here is the same chart with the vertical axis in log scale:

The log transform produces a visual distortion. On the right side, where the three lines are diverging rapidly, the log transform pulls them together. On the left side, where the three lines are close together, the log transform pulls them apart.

Recall that on the log scale, a straight line is exponential growth. Look at the green line (worst case). That line is approximately linear so in the pessimistic scenario, despite assuming full compliance to a strict test-trace-isolate regimen, the cases are projected to grow exponentially.

Something about that last chart still irked the report writers so they decided to birth a second log scale. Here is the chart they ultimately settled on:

As with the other axis, the effect of the log transform is to squeeze the larger values (on the right side) and spread out the smaller values (on the left side). After this cosmetic surgery, the left side looks relatively flat while the right side looks steep.

In the next version of the Cornell report, they should replace all these charts with ones using linear scales.

***

Upon discovering this graphical mischief, I wonder if the research team received a mandate that includes a desired outcome.

 

[P.S. 7/8/2020. For more on the Cornell model, see this post.]

What is the price for objectivity

I knew I had to remake this chart.

The simple message of this chart is hidden behind layers of visual complexity. What the analyst wants readers to focus on (as discerned from the text on the right) is the red line, the seven-day moving average of new hospital admissions due to Covid-19 in Texas.

My eyes kept wandering away from the line. It's the sideway data labels on the columns. It's the columns that take up vastly more space than the red line. It's the sideway date labels on the horizontal axis. It's the redundant axis labels for hospitalizations when the entire data set has already been printed. It's the two hanging diamonds, for which the clues are filed away in the legend above.

Here's a version that brings out the message: after Phase 2 re-opening, the number of hospital admissions has been rising steadily.

Dots are used in place of columns, which push these details to the background. The line as well as periods of re-opening are directly labeled, removing the need for a legend.

Here's another visualization:

This chart plots the weekly average new hospital admissions, instead of the seven-day moving average. In the previous chart, the raggedness of moving average isn't transmitting any useful information to the average reader. I believe this weekly average metric is easier to grasp for many readers while retaining the general story.

***

On the original chart by TMC, the author said "the daily hospitalization trend shows an objective view of how COVID-19 impacts hospital systems." Objectivity is an impossible standard for any kind of data analysis or visualization. As seen above, the two metrics for measuring the trend in hospitalizations have pros and cons. Even if one insists on using a moving average, there are choices of averaging methods and window sizes.

Scientists are trained to believe in objectivity. It frequently disappoints when we discover that the rest of the world harbors no such notion. If you observe debates between politicians or businesspeople or social scientists, you rarely hear anyone claim one analysis is more objective - or less subjective - than another. The economist who predicts Dow to reach a new record, the business manager who argues for placing discounted products in the front not the back of the store, the sportscaster who maintains Messi is a better player than Ronaldo: do you ever hear these people describe their methods as objective?

Pursuing objectivity leads to the glorification of data dumps. The scientist proclaims disinterest in holding an opinion about the data. This is self-deception though. We clearly have opinions because when someone else  "misinterprets" the data, we express dismay. What is the point of pretending to hold no opinions when most of the world trades in opinions? By being "objective," we never shape the conversation, and forever play defense.

Designs of two variables: map, dot plot, line chart, table

The New York Times found evidence that the richest segments of New Yorkers, presumably those with second or multiple homes, have exited the Big Apple during the early months of the pandemic. The article (link) is amply assisted by a variety of data graphics.

The first few charts represent different attempts to express the headline message. Their appearance in the same article allows us to assess the relative merits of different chart forms.

First up is the always-popular map.

The advantage of a map is its ease of comprehension. We can immediately see which neighborhoods experienced the greater exoduses. Clearly, Manhattan has cleared out a lot more than outer boroughs.

The limitation of the map is also in view. With the color gradient dedicated to the proportions of residents gone on May 1st, there isn't room to express which neighborhoods are richer. We have to rely on outside knowledge to make the correlation ourselves.

The second attempt is a dot plot.

We may have to take a moment to digest the horizontal axis. It's not time moving left to right but income percentiles. The poorest neighborhoods are to the left and the richest to the right. I'm assuming that these percentiles describe the distribution of median incomes in neighborhoods. Typically, when we see income percentiles, they are based on households, regardless of neighborhoods. (The former are equal-sized segments, unlike the latter.)

This data graphic has the reverse features of the map. It does a great job correlating the drop in proportion of residents at home with the income distribution but it does not convey any spatial information. The message is clear: The residents in the top 10% of New York neighborhoods are much more likely to have left town.

In the following chart, I attempted a different labeling of both axes. It cuts out the need for readers to reverse being home to not being home, and 90th percentile to top 10%.

The third attempt to convey the income--exit relationship is the most successful in my mind. This is a line chart, with time on the horizontal axis.

The addition of lines relegates the dots to the background. The lines show the trend more clearly. If directly translated from the dot plot, this line chart should have 100 lines, one for each percentile. However, the closeness of the top two lines suggests that no meaningful difference in behavior exists between the 20th and 80th percentiles. This can be conveyed to readers through a short note. Instead of displaying all 100 percentiles, the line chart selectively includes only the 99th , 95th, 90th, 80th and 20th percentiles. This is a design choice that adds by subtraction.

Along the time axis, the line chart provides more granularity than either the map or the dot plot. The exit occurred roughly over the last two weeks of March and the first week of April. The start coincided with New York's stay-at-home advisory.

This third chart is a statistical graphic. It does not bring out the raw data but features aggregated and smoothed data designed to reveal a key message.

I encourage you to also study the annotated table later in the article. It shows the power of a well-designed table.

[P.S. 6/4/2020. On the book blog, I have just published a post about the underlying surveillance data for this type of analysis.]

 

 

Consumption patterns during the pandemic

The impact of Covid-19 on the economy is sharp and sudden, which makes for some dramatic data visualization. I enjoy reading the set of charts showing consumer spending in different categories in the U.S., courtesy of Visual Capitalist.

The designer did a nice job cleaning up the data and building a sequential story line. The spending are grouped by categories such as restaurants and travel, and then sub-categories such as fast food and fine dining.

Spending is presented as year-on-year change, smoothed.

Here is the chart for the General Commerce category:

The visual design is clean and efficient. Even too sparse because one has to keep returning to the top to decipher the key events labelled 1, 2, 3, 4. Also, to find out that the percentages express year-on-year change, the reader must scroll to the bottom, and locate a footnote.

As you move down the page, you will surely make a stop at the Food Delivery category, noting that the routine is broken.

I've featured this device - an element of surprise - before. Remember this Quartz chart that depicts drinking around the world (link).

The rule for small multiples is to keep the visual design identical but vary the data from chart to chart. Here, the exceptional data force the vertical axis to extend tremendously.

This chart contains a slight oversight - the red line should be labeled "Takeout" because food delivery is the label for the larger category.

Another surprise is in store for us in the Travel category.

I kept staring at the Cruise line, and how it kept dipping below -100 percent. That seems impossible mathematically - unless these cardholders are receiving more refunds than are making new bookings. Not only must the entire sum of 2019 bookings be wiped out, but the records must also show credits issued to these credit (or debit) cards. It's curious that the same situation did not befall the airlines. I think many readers would have liked to see some text discussing this pattern.

***

Now, let me put on a data analyst's hat, and describe some thoughts that raced through my head as I read these charts.

Data analysis is hard, especially if you want to convey the meaning of the data.

The charts clearly illustrate the trends but what do the data reveal? The designer adds commentary on each chart. But most of these comments count as "story time." They contain speculation on what might be causing the trend but there isn't additional data or analyses to support the storyline. In the General Commerce category, the 50 to 100 percent jump in all subcategories around late March is attributed to people stockpiling "non-perishable food, hand sanitizer, and toilet paper". That might be true but this interpretation isn't supported by credit or debit card data because those companies do not have details about what consumers purchased, only the total amount charged to the cards. It's a lot more work to solidify these conclusions.

A lot of data do not mean complete or unbiased data.

The data platform provided data on 5 million consumers. We don't know if these 5 million consumers are representative of the 300+ million people in the U.S. Some basic demographic or geographic analysis can help establish the validity. Strictly speaking, I think they have data on 5 million card accounts, not unique individuals. Most Americans use more than one credit or debit cards. It's not likely the data vendor have a full picture of an individual's or a family's spending.

It's also unclear how much of consumer spending is captured in this dataset. Credit and debit cards are only one form of payment.

Data quality tends to get worse.

One thing that drives data analyst nuts. The spending categories are becoming blurrier. In the last decade or so, big business has come to dominate the American economy. Big business, with bipartisan support, has grown by (a) absorbing little guys, and (b) eliminating boundaries between industry sectors. Around me, there is a Walgreens, several Duane Reades, and a RiteAid. They currently have the same owner, and increasingly offer the same selection. In the meantime, Walmart (big box), CVS (pharmacy), Costco (wholesale), etc. all won regulatory relief to carry groceries, fresh foods, toiletries, etc. So, while CVS or Walgreens is classified as a pharmacy, it's not clear that what proportion of the spending there is for medicines. As big business grows, these categories become less and less meaningful.

The elusive meaning of black paintings and red blocks

Joe N, a longtime reader, tweeted about the following chart, by the People's Policy Project:

This is a simple column chart containing only two numbers, far exceeded by the count of labels and gridlines.

I look at charts like the lady staring at these Ad Reinhardts:

 

My artist friends say the black squares are not the same, if you look hard enough.

Here is what I learned after one such seating:

The tiny data labels sitting on the inside top edges of the columns hint that the right block is slightly larger than the left block.

The five labels of the vertical axis serve no purpose, nor the gridlines.

The horizontal axis for time is reversed, with 2019 appearing after 2020 (when read left to right).

The left block has one month while the right block has 12 months. This is further confused by the word "All" which shares the same starting and ending letters as "April".

As far as I can tell, the key message of this chart is that the month of April has the impact of a full year. It's like 12 months of outflows from employment hitting the economy in one month.

***

My first response is this chart:

Breaking the left block into 12 pieces, and color-coding the April piece brings out the comparison. You can also see that in 2019, the outflows from employment to unemployment were steady month to month.

Next, I want to see what happens if I restored the omitted months of Jan to March, 2020.

The story changes slightly. Now, the chart says that the first four months have already exceeded the full year of 2019.

Since the values hold steady month to month, with the exception of April 2020, I make a monthly view:

You can see the slight nudge-up in March 2020 as well. This draws more attention to the break in pattern.

For time-series data, I prefer to look at line charts:

As I explained in this post about employment statistics (or Chapter 6 of Numbersense (link)), the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies people into three categories: Employed, Unemployed and Not in Labor Force. Exits from Employed to Unemployed status contribute to unemployment in the U.S. To depict a negative trend, it's often natural to use negative numbers:

You may realize that this data series paints only a partial picture of the health of the labor market. While some people exit the Employed status each month, there are others who re-enter or enter the Employed status. We should really care about net flows.

In all of 2019, there were more entrants than exits, leading to a slightly positive net inflow to the Employed status from Unemployed (blue line). In April 2020, the red line (exits) drags the blue line dramatically.

Of course, even this chart is omitting important information. There are also flows from Employed to and from Not in Labor Force.

 

 

 

 

 

Hope and reality in one Georgia chart

Over the weekend, Georgia's State Health Department agitated a lot of people when it published the following chart:

(This might have appeared a week ago as the last date on the chart is May 9 and the title refers to "past 15 days".)

They could have avoided the embarrassment if they had read my article at DataJournalism.com (link). In that article, I lay out a set of the "unspoken conventions," things that visual designers are, or should be, doing more or less in their sleep. Under the section titled "Order", I explain the following two "rules":

• Place values in the natural order when it is available
• Retain the same order across all plots in a panel of charts

In the chart above, the natural order for the horizontal (time) axis is time running left to right. The order chosen by the designer  is roughly but not precisely decreasing height of the tallest column in each daily group. Many observers suggested that the columns were arranged to give the appearance of cases dropping over time.

Within each day, the counties are ordered in decreasing number of new cases. The title of the chart reads "number of cases over time" which sounds like cumulative cases but it's not. The "lead" changed hands so many times over the 15 days, meaning the data sequence was extremely noisy, which would be unlikely for cumulative cases. There are thousands of cases in each of these counties by May. Switching the order of the columns within each daily group defeats the purpose of placing these groups side-by-side.

Responding to the bad press, the department changed the chart design for this week's version:

This chart now conforms to the two spoken rules described above. The time axis runs left to right, and within each group of columns, the order of the counties is maintained.

The chart is still very noisy, with no apparent message.

***

Next, I'd like to draw your attention to a Data issue. Notice that the 15-day window has shifted. This revised chart runs from May 2 to May 16, which is this past Saturday. The previous chart ran from Apr 26 to May 9. 

Here's the data for May 8 and 9 placed side by side.

There is a clear time lag of reporting cases in the State of Georgia. This chart should always exclude the last few days. The case counts keep going up until it stabilizes. The same mistake occurs in the revised chart - the last two days appear as if new cases have dwindled toward zero when in fact, it reflects a lag in reporting.

The disconnect between the Question being posed and the quality of the Data available dooms this visualization. It is not possible to provide a reliable assessment of the "past 15 days" when during perhaps half of that period, the cases are under-counted.

***

This graphical distortion due to "immature" data has become very commonplace in Covid-19 graphics. It's similar to placing partial-year data next to full-year results, without calling out the partial data.

The following post from the ancient past (2005!) about a New York Times graphic shows that calling out this data problem does not actually solve it. It's a less-bad kind of thing.

The coronavirus data present more headaches for graphic designers than the financial statistics. Because of accounting regulations, we know that only the current quarter's data are immature. For Covid-19 reporting, the numbers are being adjusted for days and weeks.

Practically all immature counts are under-estimates. Over time, more cases are reported. Thus, any plots over time - if unadjusted - paint a misleading picture of declining counts. The effect of the reporting lag is predictable, having a larger impact as we run from left to right in time. Thus, even if the most recent data show a downward trend, it can eventually mean anything: down, flat or up. This is not random noise though - we know for certain of the downward bias; we just don't know the magnitude of the distortion for a while.

Another issue that concerns coronavirus reporting but not financial reporting is inconsistent standards across counties. Within a business, if one were to break out statistics by county, the analysts would naturally apply the same counting rules. For Covid-19 data, each county follows its own set of rules, not just  how to count things but also how to conduct testing, and so on.

Finally, with the politics of re-opening, I find it hard to trust the data. Reported cases are human-driven data - by changing the number of tests, by testing different mixes of people, by delaying reporting, by timing the revision of older data, by explicit manipulation, ...., the numbers can be tortured into any shape. That's why it is extremely important that the bean-counters are civil servants, and that politicians are kept away. In the current political environment, that separation between politics and statistics has been breached.

***

Why do we have low-quality data? Human decisions, frequently political decisions, adulterate the data. Epidemiologists are then forced to use the bad data, because that's what they have. Bad data lead to bad predictions and bad decisions, or if the scientists account for the low quality, predictions with high levels of uncertainty. Then, the politicians complain that predictions are wrong, or too wide-ranging to be useful. If they really cared about those predictions, they could start by being more transparent about reporting and more proactive at discovering and removing bad accounting practices. The fact that they aren't focused on improving the data gives the game away. Here's a recent post on the politics of data.

 

How Covid-19 deaths sneaked into Florida's statistics

Like many others, some Floridians are questioning their state's Covid statistics. It's clear there are numerous "degrees of freedom" for politicians to manipulate the numbers. What's not clear is who's influencing these decisions. Are they public-health experts, donors, voters, or whom?

A Twitter follower sent in the following chart, embedded in an informative article in Sun-Sentinel:

I like the visual design. It's clean, and conveys a moderately complex concept effectively. The reader may not immediately get what metrics are being plotted but the idea that the blue line should operate within the gray area.. until it doesn't is easily grasped. The range is technically an uncertainty band.

The metric is the proportion of total deaths (all causes) that are attributed to pneumonia and flu. Typical influenza deaths are found in that category. This chart investigates whether there were excess (unexplained) P&F deaths. The gray band measures the variability in the proportions of past years. When the blue line operates inside the band, the metric is normal. When it pierces the upper band, which happened here around week 25, a rare event has occurred.

The concern on Twitter was about the horizontal axis. Those integer labels can be confusing. The designer places a "how to read this" message in a footnote, explaining that week 1 is the first week of a typical flu season (which corresponds to late September 2019). This nugget of information helps a lot. We can see that the flu season peaks around week 20, and by the spring, it should be waning. Not so in 2020.

It's hard to escape the conclusion that deaths from Covid-19 are hiding inside the statistics of Pneumonia & Flu. As a statistician, I want to tell you Statistics Don't Lie! You can hide the data along one dimension, but they show up elsewhere. Misclassifying the deaths does buy someone some time. It takes a few weeks to compile all-cause mortality data (gasp, the CDC said mortality records are only 75 percent accurate after 8 weeks!)

The other small problem with the chart is the labeling. Neither axis has labels. The data label that shows up when you click on the line might be a default from the software that can't be turned off. It shows the two numbers being plotted without labels.

***

Here is a re-working of the chart that tells the story:

The proportion of deaths attributed to P&F and Covid together is roughly double the upper end of what Florida should be seeing this time of the year (without Covid). Covid-19 accounts for half the gap. The other half are still being classified as P&F. However, I suspect CDC will adjust these numbers later to reflect the reality. (In making this chart, I also learned that Florida stopped including seasonal visitors in the death counts. This is egregious manipulation. If someone died while in Florida, they should be counted. I didn't investigate whether this counting rule applies only to Covid-19 deaths, or to deaths from all causes. If they had always done that, then I might give them a pass.)

On second thought, maybe not. The other egregious thing that appeared to have happened is that the Florida state health department unplugged their prior website (https://www.floridahealth.gov) so no one can cross-reference any prior documents. The only website I can access now for Florida state health is a Covid-specific site (https://floridahealthcovid19.gov).

There must be something juicy on the previous influenza page, no?

***

Lastly, when you look at my chart, please pretend that the last week is not on there. In all likelihood, the "drop" is fake because the mortality data have not been fully updated. My chart contains one more week than the Sun Sentinel chart. So you can see that the drastic decline shown on their chart turned up a big uptick on mine (next to last week).

This is a common mistake on many charts I see these days. Half-baked numbers are shown next to fully-baked ones.

Reviewing the charts in the Oxford Covid-19 study

On my sister (book) blog, I published a mega-post that examines the Oxford study that was cited two weeks ago as a counterpoint to the "doomsday" Imperial College model. These studies bring attention to the art of statistical modeling, and those six posts together are designed to give you a primer, and you don't need math to get a feel.

One aspect that didn't make it to the mega-post is the data visualization. Sad to say, the charts in the Oxford study (link) are uniformly terrible. Figure 3 is typical:

There are numerous design decisions that frustrate readers.

a) The graphic contains two charts, one on top of the other. The left axis extends floor-to-ceiling, giving the false impression that it is relevant to both charts. In fact, the graphic uses dual axes. The bottom chart references the axis shown in the bottom right corner; the left axis is meaningless. The two charts should be drawn separately.

For those who have not read the mega-post about the Oxford models, let me give a brief description of what these charts are saying. The four colors refer to four different models - these models have the same structure but different settings. The top chart shows the proportion of the population that is still susceptible to infection by a certain date. In these models, no one can get re-infected, and so you see downward curves. The bottom chart displays the growth in deaths due to Covid-19. The first death in the UK was reported on March 5.  The black dots are the official fatalities.

b) The designer allocates two-thirds of the space to the top chart, which has a much simpler message. This causes the bottom chart to be compressed beyond cognition.

c) The top chart contains just five lines, smooth curves of the same shape but different slopes. The designer chose to use thick colored lines with black outlines. As a result, nothing precise can be read from the chart. When does the yellow line start dipping? When do the two orange lines start to separate?

d) The top chart should have included margins of error. These models are very imprecise due to the sparsity of data.

e) The bottom chart should be rejected by peer reviewers. We are supposed to judge how well each of the five models fits the cumulative death counts. But three design decisions conspire to prevent us from getting the answer: (i) the vertical axis is severely compressed by tucking this chart underneath the top chart (ii) the vertical axis uses a log scale which compresses large values and (iii) the larger-than-life dots.

As I demonstrated in this post also from the sister blog, many models especially those assuming an exponential growth rate has poor fits after the first few days. Charting in log scale hides the degree of error.

f) There is a third chart squeezed into the same canvass. Notice the four little overlapping hills located around Feb 1. These hills are probability distributions, which are presented without an appropriate vertical axis. Each hill represents a particular model's estimate of the date on which the novel coronavirus entered the UK. But that date is unknowable. So the model expresses this uncertainty using a probability distribution. The "peak" of the distribution is the most likely date. The spread of the hill gives the range of plausible dates, and the height at a given date indicates the chance that that is the date of introduction. The missing axis is a probability scale, which is neither the left nor the right axis.

***

The bottom chart shows up in a slightly different form as Figure 1(A).

Here, the green, gray (blocked) and red thick lines correspond to the yellow/orange/red diamonds in Figure 3. The thin green and red lines show the margins of error I referred to above (these lines are not explicitly explained in the chart annotation.) The actual counts are shown as white rather than black diamonds.

Again, the thick lines and big diamonds conspire to swamp the gaps between model fit and actual data. Again, notice the use of a log scale. This means that the same amount of gap signifies much bigger errors as time moves to the right.

When using the log scale, we should label it using the original units. With a base 10 logarithm, the axis should have labels 1, 10, 100, 1000 instead of 0, 1, 2, 3. (This explains my previous point - why small gaps between a model line and a diamond can mean a big error as the counts go up.)

Also notice how the line of white diamonds makes it impossible to see what the models are doing prior to March 5, the date of the first reported death. The models apparently start showing fatalities prior to March 5. This is a key part of their conclusion - the Oxford team concluded that the coronavirus has been circulating in the U.K. even before the first infection was reported. The data visualization should therefore bring out the difference in timing.

I hope by the time the preprint is revised, the authors will have improved the data visualization.

 

 

 

The hidden bad assumption behind most dual-axis time-series charts

[Note: As of Monday afternoon, Typepad is having problems rendering images. Please try again later if the charts are not loading properly.]

DC sent me the following chart over Twitter. It supposedly showcases one sector that has bucked the economic collapse, and has conversely been boosted by the stay-at-home orders around the world.

At first glance, I was drawn to the yellow line and the axis title on the right side. I understood the line to depict the growth rate in traffic "vs a normal day". The trend is clear as day. Since March 10 or so, the website has become more popular by the week.

For a moment, I thought the thin black line was a trendline that fits the rather ragged traffic growth data. But looking at the last few data points, I was afraid it was a glove that didn't fit. That's when I realized this is a dual-axis chart. The black line shows the worldwide total Covid-19 cases, with the axis shown on the left side.

As with any dual-axis charts, you can modify the relationship between the two scales to paint a different picture.

This next chart says that the site traffic growth lagged Covid-19 growth until around March 14.

This one gives an ambiguous picture. One can't really say there is a strong correlation between the two time series.

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Now, let's look at the chart from the DATA corner of the Trifecta Checkup (link). The analyst selected definitions that are as far apart as possible. So this chart gives a good case study of the intricacy of data definitions.

First, notice the smoothness of the line of Covid-19 cases. This data series is naturally "smoothed" because it is an aggregate of country-level counts, which themselves are aggregates of regional counts.

By contrast, the line of traffic growth rates has not been smoothed. That's why we see sharp ups and downs. This series should be smoothed as well.

The seven-day moving average line indicates a steady growth in traffic. The day-to-day fluctuations represent noise that distracts us from seeing the trendline.

Second, the Covid-19 series is a cumulative count, which means it's constantly heading upward over time (on rare days, it may go flat but never decrease). The traffic series represents change, is not cumulative, and so it can go up or down over time. To bring the data closer together, the Covid-19 series can be converted into new cases so they are change values.

Third, the traffic series are growth rates as percentages while the Covid-19 series are counts. It is possible to turn Covid-19 counts into growth rates as well. Like this:

By standardizing the units of measurement, both time series can be plotted on the same axis. Here is the new plot:

Third, the two growth rates have different reference levels. The Covid-19 growth rate I computed is day-on-day growth. This is appropriate since we don't presume there is a seasonal effect - something like new cases on Mondays are typically larger than new cases on Tuesday doesn't seem plausible.

Thanks to this helpful explainer (link), I learned what the data analyst meant by a "normal day". The growth rate of traffic is not day-on-day change. It is the change in traffic relative to the average traffic in the last four weeks on the same day of week. If it's a Monday, the change in traffic is relative to the average traffic of the last four Mondays.

This type of seasonal adjustment is used if there is a strong day-of-week effect. For example, if the website reliably gets higher traffic during weekends than weekdays, then the Saturday traffic may always exceed the Friday traffic; instead of comparing Saturday to the day before, we index Saturday to the previous Saturday, Friday to the previous Friday, and then compare those two values.

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Let's consider the last chart above, the one where I got rid of the dual axes.

A major problem with trying to establish correlation of two time series is time lag. Most charts like this makes a critical and unspoken assumption - that the effect of X on Y is immediate. This chart assumes that the higher the number Covid-19 cases, the more people stays home that day, the more people swarms the site that day. Said that way, you might see it's ridiculous.

What is true of any correlations in the wild - there is always some amount of time lag. It usually is hard to know how much lag.

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Finally, the chart omitted a huge factor driving the growth in traffic. At various times dependent on the country, the website rolled out a free premium service offer. This is the primary reason for the spike around mid March. How much of the traffic growth is due to the popular marketing campaign, and how much is due to stay-at-home orders - that's the real question.