Tongue in cheek but a master stroke

Andrew jumped on the Benford bandwagon to do a tongue-in-cheek analysis of numbers in Hollywood movies (link). The key graphic is this:

Benford's Law is frequently invoked to prove (or disprove) fraud with numbers by examining the distribution of first digits. Andrew extracted movies that contain numbers in their names - mostly but not always sequences of movies with sequels. The above histogram (gray columns) are the number of movies with specific first digits. The red line is the expected number if Benford's Law holds. As typical of such analysis, the histogram is closely aligned with the red line, and therefore, he did not find any fraud. 

I'll blog about my reservations about Benford-style analysis on the book blog later - one quick point is: as with any statistical analysis, we should say there is no statistical evidence of fraud (more precisely, of the kind of fraud that can be discovered using Benford's Law), which is different from saying there is no fraud.

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Andrew also showed a small-multiples chart that breaks up the above chart by movie groups. I excerpted the top left section of the chart below:

The genius in this graphic is easily missed.

Notice that the red lines (which are the expected values if Benford Law holds) appear identical on every single plot. And then notice that the lines don't represent the same values.

It's great to have the red lines look the same everywhere because they represent the immutable Benford reference. Because the number of movies is so small, he's plotting counts instead of proportions. If you let the software decide on the best y-axis range for each plot, the red lines will look different on different charts!

You can find the trick in the R code from Gelman's blog.

First, the maximum value of each plot is set to the total number of observations. Then, the expected Benford proportions are converted into expected Benford counts. The first Benford count is then shown against an axis topping out at the total count, and thus, relatively, what we are seeing are the Benford proportions. Thus, every red line looks the same despite holding different values.

This is a master stroke.

 

 

 

Visually displaying multipliers

As I'm preparing a blog about another real-world study of Covid-19 vaccines, I came across the following chart (the chart title is mine).

As background, this is the trend in Covid-19 cases in the U.K. in the last couple of months, courtesy of OurWorldinData.org.

The React-1 Study sends swab kits to randomly selected people in England in order to assess the prevalence of Covid-19. Every month, there is a new round of returned swabs that are tested for Covid-19. This measurement method captures asymptomatic cases although it probably missed severe and hospitalized cases. Despite having some shortcomings, this is a far better way to measure cases than the hotch-potch assembling of variable-quality data submitted by different jurisdictions that has become the dominant source of our data.

Rounds 12 and 13 captured an inflection point in the pandemic in England. The period marked the beginning of the end of the belief that widespread vaccination will end the pandemic.

The chart I excerpted up top broke the data down by age groups. The column heights represent the estimated prevalence of Covid-19 during each round - also, described precisely in the paper as "swab positivity." Based on the study's design, one may generalize the prevalence to the population at large. About 1.5% of those aged 13-24 in England are estimated to have Covid-19 around the time of Round 13 (roughly early July).

The researchers came to the following conclusion:

We show that the third wave of infections in England was being driven primarily by the Delta variant in younger, unvaccinated people. This focus of infection offers considerable scope for interventions to reduce transmission among younger people, with knock-on benefits across the entire population... In our data, the highest prevalence of infection was among 12 to 24 year olds, raising the prospect that vaccinating more of this group by extending the UK programme to those aged 12 to 17 years could substantially reduce transmission potential in the autumn when levels of social mixing increase

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Raise your hand if the graphics software you prefer dictates at least one default behavior you can't stand. I'm sure most hands are up in the air. No matter how much you love the software, there is always something the developer likes that you don't.

The first thing I did with today's chart is to get rid of all such default details.

For me, the bottom chart is cleaner and more inviting.

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The researchers wanted readers to think in terms of Round 3 numbers as multiples of Round 2 numbers. In the text, they use statements such as:

weighted prevalence in round 13 was nine-fold higher in 13-17 year olds at 1.56% (1.25%, 1.95%) compared with 0.16% (0.08%, 0.31%) in round 12

It's not easy to perceive a nine-fold jump from the paired column chart, even though this chart form is better than several others. I added some subtle divisions inside each orange column in order to facilitate this task:

I have recommended this before. I'm co-opting pictograms in constructing the column chart.

An alternative is to plot everything on an index scale although one would have to drop the prevalence numbers.

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The chart requires an additional piece of context to interpret properly. I added each age group's share of the population below the chart - just to illustrate this point, not to recommend it as a best practice.

The researchers concluded that their data supported vaccinating 13-17 year olds because that group experienced the highest multiplier from Round 12 to Round 13. Notice that the 13-17 year old age group represents only 6 percent of England's population, and is the least populous age group shown on the chart.

The neighboring 18-24 age group experienced a 4.5 times jump in prevalence in Round 13 so this age group is doing much better than 13-17 year olds, right? Not really.

While the same infection rate was found in both age groups during this period, the slightly older age group accounted for 50% more cases -- and that's due to the larger share of population.

A similar calculation shows that while the infection rate of people under 24 is about 3 times higher than that of those 25 and over, both age groups suffered over 175,000 infections during the Round 3 time period (the difference between groups was < 4,000).  So I don't agree that focusing on 13-17 year olds gives England the biggest bang for the buck: while they are the most likely to get infected, their cases account for only 14% of all infections. Almost half of the infections are in people 25 and over.

 

Simple charts are the hardest to do right

The CDC website has a variety of data graphics about many topics, one of which is U.S. vaccinations. I was looking for information about Covid-19 data broken down by age groups, and that's when I landed on these charts (link).

The left panel shows people with at least one dose, and the right panel shows those who are "fully vaccinated." This simple chart takes an unreasonable amount of time to comprehend.

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The analyst introduces three metrics, all of which are described as "percentages". Upon reflection, they are proportions of the people in specific age ranges.

Readers are thus invited to compare these proportions. It's not clear, however, which comparisons are intended. The first item listed in the legend states "Percent among Persons who completed all recommended doses in last 14 days". For most readers, including me, this introduces an unexpected concept. The 14 days here do not refer to the (in)famous 14-day case-counting window but literally the most recent two weeks relative to when the chart was produced.

It would have been clearer if the concept of Proportions were introduced in the chart title or axis title, while the color legend explains the concept of the base population. From the lighter shade to the darker shade (of red and blue) to the gray color, the base population shifts from "Among Those Who Completed/Initiated Vaccinations Within Last 14 Days" to "Among Those Who Completed/Initiated Vaccinations Any Time" to "Among the U.S. Population (regardless of vaccination status)".

Also, a reverse order helps our comprehension. Each subsequent category is a subset of the one above. First, the whole population, then those who are fully vaccinated, and finally those who recently completed vaccinations.

The next hurdle concerns the Q corner of our Trifecta Checkup. The design leaves few hints as to what question(s) its creator intended to address. The age distribution of the U.S. population is useless unless it is compared to something.

One apparently informative comparison is the age distribution of those fully vaccinated versus the age distribution of all Americans. This is revealed by comparing the lengths of the dark blue bar and the gray bar. But is this comparison informative? It's telling me that people aged 50 to 64 account for ~25% of those who are fully vaccinated, and ~20% of all Americans. Because proportions necessarily add to 100%, this implies that other age groups have been less vaccinated. Duh! Isn't that the result of an age-based vaccination prioritization? During the first week of the vaccination campaign, one might expect close to 100% of all vaccinations to be in the highest age group while it was 0% for the other age groups.

This is a chart in search of a question. The 25% vs 20% comparison does not assist readers in making a judgement. Does this mean the vaccination campaign is working as expected, worse than expected or better than expected? The problem is the wrong baseline. The designer of this chart implies that the expected proportions should conform to the overall age distribution - but that clearly stands in the way of CDC's initial prioritization of higher-risk age groups.

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In my version of the chart, I illustrate the proportion of people in each age group who have been fully vaccinated.

Among those fully vaccinated, some did it within the most recent two weeks:

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Elsewhere on the CDC site, one learns that on these charts, "fully vaccinated" means one shot of J&J or 2 shots of Pfizer or Moderna, without dealing with the 14-day window or other complications. Why do we think different definitions are used in different analyses? Story-first thinking, as I have explained here. When it comes to telling the story about vaccinations, the story is about the number of shots in arms. They want as big a number as possible, and abandon any criterion that decreases the count. When it comes to reporting on vaccine effectiveness, they want as small a number of cases as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

Ranking data provide context but can also confuse

This dataviz from the Economist had me spending a lot of time clicking around - which means it is a success.

The graphic presents four measures of wellbeing in society - life expectancy, infant mortality rate, murder rate and prison population. The primary goal is to compare nations across those metrics. The focus is on comparing how certain nations (or subgroups) rank against each other, as indicated by the relative vertical position.

The Economist staff has a particular story to tell about racial division in the US. The dotted bars represent the U.S. average. The colored bars are the averages for Hispanic, white and black Americans. The wider the gap between the colored bars, the more variant is the experiences between American races.

The chart shows that the racial gap of life expectancy is the widest. For prison population, the U.S. and its racial subgroups occupy many of the lowest (i.e. least desirable) ranks, with the smallest gap in ranking.

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The primary element of interactivity is hovering on a bar, which then highlights the four bars corresponding to the particular nation selected. Here is the picture for Thailand:

According to this view of the world, Thailand is a close cousin of the U.S. On each metric, the Thai value clings pretty near the U.S. average and sits within the range by racial groups. I'm surprised to learn that the prison population in Thailand is among the highest in the world.

Unfortunately, this chart form doesn't facilitate comparing Thailand to a country other than the U.S as one can highlight only one country at a time.

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While the main focus of the chart is on relative comparison through ranking, the reader can extract absolute difference by reading the lengths of the bars.

This is a close-up of the bottom of the prison population metric:

The length of each bar displays the numeric data. The red line is an outlier in this dataset. Black Americans suffer an incarceration rate that is almost three times the national average. Even white Americans (blue line) is imprisoned at a rate higher than most countries around the world.

As noted above, the prison population metric exhibits the smallest gap between racial subgroups. This chart is a great example of why ranking data frequently hide important information. The small gap in ranking masks the extraordinary absolute difference in incareration rates between white and black America.

The difference between rank #1 and rank #2 is enormous.

The opposite situation appears for life expectancy. The life expectancy values are bunched up especially at the top of the scale. The absolute difference between Hispanic and black America is 82 - 75 = 7 years, which looks small because the axis starts at zero. On a ranking scale, Hispanic is roughly in the top 15% while black America is just above the median. The relative difference is huge.

For life expectancy, ranking conveys the view that even a 7-year difference is a big deal because the countries are tightly bunched together. For prison population, ranking shows the view that a multiple fold difference is "unimportant" because a 20-0 blowout and a 10-0 blowout are both heavy defeats.

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Whenever you transform numeric data to ranks, remember that you are artificially treating the gap between each value and the next value as a constant, even when the underlying numeric gaps show wide variance.

 

 

 

 

 

Hanging things on your charts

The Financial Times published the following chart that shows the rollout of vaccines in the U.K.

(I can't find the online link to the article. The article is titled "AstraZeneca and Oxford face setbacks and success as battle enters next phase", May 29/30 2021.)

This chart form is known as a "streamgraph", and it is a stacked area chart in disguise. 

The same trick can be applied to a column chart. See the "hanging" column chart below:

The two charts show exactly the same data. The left one roots the columns at the bottom. The right one aligns the middle of the columns. 

I have rarely found these hanging charts useful. The realignment makes it harder to compare the sizes of the different column segments. On the normal stacked column chart, the yellow segments are the easiest to compare because they share the same base level. Even this is taken away from the reader on the right side.

Note also that the hanging version does not admit a vertical axis. 

The same comments apply to the streamgraph.

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Nevertheless, I was surprised that the FT chart shown above actually works. The main message I learned was that initially U.K. primarily rolled out AstraZeneca and, to a lesser extent, Pfizer, shots while later, they introduced other vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, CureVac, Moderna, and "Other". 

I can also see that the supply of AstraZeneca has not changed much through the entire time window. Pfizer has grown to roughly the same scale as AstraZeneca. Moderna remains a small fraction of total shots. 

I can even roughly see that the total number of vaccinations has grown about six times from start to finish. 

That's quite a lot for one chart, so job well done!

There is one problem with the FT chart. It should have labelled end of May as "today". Half the chart is history, and the other half is the future.

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For those following Covid-19 news, the FT chart is informative in a different way.

There is a misleading statement going around blaming the U.K.'s recent surge in cases on the Astrazeneca vaccine, claiming that the U.K. mostly uses AZ. This chart shows that from the start, about a third of the shots administered in the U.K. are Pfizer, and Pfizer's share has been growing over time. 

U.K. compared to some countries mostly using mRNA vaccines

U.K. is almost back to the winter peak. That's because the U.K. is serious about counting cases. Look at the state of testing in these countries:

What's clear about the U.S. case count is that it is kept low by cutting the number of tests by two-thirds, thus, our data now is once again severely biased towards severe cases. 

We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. The drop in testing may directly lead to a proportional drop in reported cases, thus removing 500 (asymptomatic, or mild) cases per million from the case count. The case count goes below 250 per million so the additional 200 or so reduction is due to other reasons such as vaccinations.

Did prices go up or down? Depends on how one looks at the data

The U.S. media have been flooded with reports of runaway inflation recently, and it's refreshing to see a nice article in the Wall Street Journal that takes a second look at the data. Because as my readers know, raw data can be incredibly deceptive.

Inflation typically describes the change in price level relative to the prior year. The month-on-month change in price levels is a simple seasonal adjustment used to remove the effect of seasonality that masks the true change in price levels. (See this explainer of seasonal adjustment.)

As the pandemic enters the second year, this methodology is comparing 2021 price levels to pandemic-impacted price levels of 2020. This produces a very confusing picture. As the WSJ article explains, prices can be lower than they were in 2019 (pre-pandemic) and yet substantially higher than they were in 2020 (during the pandemic). This happens in industry sectors that were heavily affected by the economic shutdown, e.g. hotels, travel, entertainment.

Here is how they visualized this phenomenon. Amusingly, some algorithm estimated that it should take 5 minutes to read the entire article. It may take that much time to understand properly what this chart is showing.

Let me save you some time.

The chart shows monthly inflation rates of hotel price levels.

The pink horizontal stripes represent the official inflation numbers, which compare each month's hotel prices to those of a year prior. The most recent value for May of 2021 says hotel prices rose by 9% compared to May of 2020.

The blue horizontal stripes show an alternative calculation which compares each month's hotel prices to those of two years prior. Think of 2018-9 as "normal" years, pre-pandemic. Using this measure, we find that hotel prices for May of 2021 are about 4% lower than for May of 2019.

(This situation affects all of our economic statistics. We may see an expansion in employment levels from a year ago which still leaves us behind where we were before the pandemic.)

What confused me on the WSJ chart are the blocks of color. In a previous chart, the readers learn that solid colors mean inflation rose while diagonal lines mean inflation decreased. It turns out that these are month-over-month changes in inflation rates (notice that one end of the column for the previous month touches one end of the column of the next month).

The color patterns become the most dominant feature of this chart, and yet the month-over-month change in inflation rates isn't the crux of the story. The real star of the story should be the difference in inflation rates - for any given month - between two reference years.

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In the following chart, I focus attention on the within-month, between-reference-years comparisons.

Because hotel prices dropped drastically during the pandemic, and have recovered quite well in recent months as the U.S. reopens the economy, the inflation rate of hotel prices is almost 10%. Nevertheless, the current price level is still 7% below the pre-pandemic level.

 

 

Start at zero improves this chart but only slightly

The following chart was forwarded to me recently:

It's a good illustration of why the "start at zero" rule exists for column charts. The poor Indian lady looks extremely short in this women's club. Is the average Indian woman really half as tall as the average South African woman? (Surely not!)

The problem is only superficially fixed by starting the vertical axis at zero. Doing so highlights the fact that the difference in average heights is but a fraction of the average heights themselves. The intra-country differences are squashed in such a representation - which works against the primary goal of the data visualization itself.

Recall the Trifecta Checkup. At the top of the trifecta is the Question. The designer obviously wants to focus our attention on the difference of the averages. A column chart showing average heights fails the job!

This "proper" column chart sends the message that the difference in average heights is noise, unworthy of our attention. But this is a bad take of the underlying data. The range of average heights across countries isn't that wide, by virtue of large population sizes.

According to Wikipedia, they range from 4 feet 10.5 to 5 feet 6 (I'm ignoring several entries in the table based on non representative small samples.) How do we know that the difference of 2 inches between averages of South Africa and India is actually a sizable difference? The Wikipedia table has the average heights for most of the world's countries. There are perhaps 200 values. These values are sprinkled inside the range of about 8 inches top to bottom. If we divide the full range into 10 equal bins, that's roughly 0.8 inches per bin. So if we have two numbers that are 2 inches apart, they almost span 2 bins. If the data were evenly distributed, that's a huge shift.

(In reality, the data should be normally distributed, bell-shaped, with much more at the center than on the edges. That makes a difference of 2 inches even more significant if these are normal values near the center but less significant if these are extreme values on the tails. Stats students should be able to articulate why we are sure the data are normally distributed without having to plot the data.)

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The original chart has further problems.

Another source of distortion comes from the scaling of the stick figures. The aspect ratio is being preserved, which means the area is being scaled. Given that the heights are scaled as per the data, the data are encoded twice, the second time in the widths. This means that the sizes of these figures grow at the rate of the square of the heights. (Contrast this with the scaling discussed in my earlier post this week which preserves the relative areas.)

At the end of that last post, I discuss why adding colors to a chart when the colors do not encode any data is a distraction to the reader. And this average height chart is an example.

From the Data corner of the Trifecta Checkup, I'm intrigued by the choice of countries. Why is Scotland highlighted instead of the U.K.? Why Latvia? According to Wikipedia, the Latvia estimate is based on a 1% sample of only 19 year olds.

Some of the data appear to be incorrect (or the designer used a different data source). Wikipedia lists the average height of Latvian women as 5 ft 6.5 while the chart shows 5 ft 5 in. Peru's average height of females is listed as 4 ft 11.5 and of males as 5 ft 4.5. The chart shows 5 ft 4 in.

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Lest we think only amateurs make this type of chart, here is an example of a similar chart in a scientific research journal:

(link to original)

I have seen many versions of the above column charts with error bars, and the vertical axes not starting at zero. In every case, the heights (and areas) of these columns do not scale with the underlying data.

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I tried a variant of the stem-and-leaf plot:

The scale is chosen to reflect the full range of average heights given in Wikipedia. The chart works better with more countries to fill out the distribution. It shows India is on the short end of the scale but not quite the lowest. (As mentioned above, Peru actually should be placed close to the lower edge.)

 

Distorting perception versus distorting the data

This chart appears in the latest ("last print issue") of Schwab's On Investing magazine:

I know I don't like triangular charts, and in this post, I attempt to verbalize why.

It's not the usual complaint of distorting the data. When the base of the triangle is fixed, and only the height is varied, then the area is proportional to the height and thus nothing is distorted.

Nevertheless, my ability to compare those triangles pales in comparison to the following columns.

This phenomenon is not limited to triangles. One can take columns and start varying the width, and achieve a similar effect:

It's really the aspect ratio - the relationship between the height and the width that's the issue.

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Interestingly, with an appropriately narrow base, even the triangular shape can be saved.

In a sense, we can think of the width of these shapes as noise, a distraction - because the width is constant, and not encoding any data.

It's like varying colors for no reason at all. It introduces a pointless dimension.

It may be prettier but the colors also interfere with our perception of the changing heights.

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.

Probabilities and proportions: which one is the chart showing

The New York Times showed this chart (link):

My first read: oh my gosh, 40-50% of the unvaccinated Americans are living their normal lives - dining at restaurants, assembling with more than 10 people, going to religious gatherings.

After reading the text around this chart, I realize I have misinterpreted it.

The chart should be read by columns. Each column is a "pie chart". For example, the first column shows that half the restaurant diners are not vaccinated, a third are fully vaccinated, and the remainder are partially vaccinated. The other columns have roughly the same proportions.

The author says "The rates of vaccination among people doing these activities largely reflect the rates in the population." This line is perhaps more confusing than intended. What she's saying is that in the general population, half of us are unvaccinated, a third are fully unvaccinated, and the remainder are partially vaccinated.

Here's a picture:

What this chart is saying is that the people dining out is like a random sample from all Americans. So too the other groups depicted. What Americans are choosing to do is independent of their vaccination status.

Unvaccinated people are no less likely to be doing all these activities than the fully vaccinated. This raises the question: are half of the people not wearing masks outdoors unvaccinated?

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Why did I read the chart wrongly in the first place? It has to do with expectations.

Most survey charts plot probabilities not proportions. I haphazardly grabbed the following Pew Research chart as an example:

From this chart, we learn that 30% of kids 9-11 years old uses TikTok compared to 11% of kids 5-8.  The percentages down a column do not sum to 100%.