Junk Charts

Elegant way to present a pair of charts

The Bloomberg team has come up with a few goodies lately. I was captivated by the following graphic about the ebb and flow of U.S. presidential candidates across recent campaigns. Link to the full presentation here.

The highlight is at the bottom of the page. This is an excerpt of the chart:

From top to bottom are the sequential presidential races. The far right vertical axis is the finish line. Going right to left is the time before the finish line. In 2008, for example, there are candidates who entered the race much earlier than typical.

This chart presents an aggregate view of the data. We get a sense of when most of the candidates enter the race, when most of them are knocked out, and also a glimpse of outliers. The general pattern across multiple elections is also clear. The design is a stacked area chart with the baseline in the middle, rather than the bottom, of the chart.

Sure, the chart can disappoint those readers who want details and precise numbers. It's not immediately apparent how many candidates were in the race at the height of 2008, nor who the candidates were.

The designer added a nice touch. By clicking on any of the stacks, it transforms into a bar chart, showing the extent of each candidate's participation in the race.

I wish this was a way to collapse the bar chart back to the stack. You can reload the page to start afresh.

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This elegant design touch makes the user experience playful. It's also an elegant way to present what is essentially a panel of plots. Imagine the more traditional presentation of placing the stack and the bar chart side by side.

This design does not escape the trade-off between entertainment value and data integrity. Looking at the 2004 campaign, one should expect to see the blue stack halve in size around day 100 when Kerry became the last man standing. That moment is not marked in the stack. The stack can be interpreted as a smoothed version of the count of active candidates.

I suppose some may complain the stack misrepresents the data somewhat. I find it an attractive way of presenting the big-picture message to an audience that mostly spend less than a minute looking at the graphic.

Seeking simplicity in complex data: Bloomberg's dataviz on UK gender pay gap

Bloomberg featured a thought-provoking dataviz that illustrates the pay gap by gender in the U.K. The dataset underlying this effort is complex, and the designers did a good job simplifying the data for ease of comprehension.

U.K. companies are required to submit data on salaries and bonuses by gender, and by pay quartiles. The dataset is incomplete, since some companies are slow to report, and the analyst decided not to merge companies that changed names.

Companies are classified into industry groups. Readers who read Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) should ask whether these group differences are meaningful by themselves, without controlling for seniority, job titles, etc. The chapter features one method used by the educational testing industry to take a more nuanced analysis of group differences.

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The Bloomberg visualization has two sections. In the top section, each company is represented by the percent difference between average female pay and average male pay. Then the companies within a given industry is shown in a histogram. The histograms provide a view of the disparity between companies within a given industry. The black line represents the relative proportion of companies in a given industry that have no gender pay gap but it’s the weight of the histogram on either side of the black line that carries the graphic’s message.

This is the histogram for arts, entertainment and recreation.

The spread within this industry is very wide, especially on the left side of the black line. A large proportion of these companies pay women less on average than men, and how much less is highly variable. There is one extreme positive value: Chelsea FC Foundation that pays the average female about 40% more than the average male.

This is the histogram for the public sector.

It is a much tighter distribution, meaning that the pay gaps vary less from organization to organization (this statement ignores the possibility that there are outliers not visible on this graphic). Again, the vast majority of entities in this sector pay women less than men on average.

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The second part of the visualization look at the quartile data. The employees of each company are divided into four equal-sized groups, based on their wages. Think of these groups as the Top 25% Earners, the Second 25%, etc. Within each group, the analyst looks at the proportion of women. If gender is independent of pay, then we should expect the proportions of women to be about the same for all four quartiles. (This analysis considers gender to be the only explainer for pay gaps. This is a problem I've called xyopia, that frames a complex multivariate issue as a bivariate problem involving one outcome and one explanatory variable. Chapter 3 of Numbers Rule Your World (link) discusses how statisticians approach this issue.)

On the right is the chart for the public sector. This is a pie chart used as a container. Every pie has four equal-sized slices representing the four quartiles of pay.

The female proportion is encoded in both the size and color of the pie slices. The size encoding is more precise while the color encoding has only 4 levels so it provides a “binned” summary view of the same data.

For the public sector, the lighter-colored slice shows the top 25% earners, and its light color means the proportion of women in the top 25% earners group is between 30 and 50 percent. As we move clockwise around the pie, the slices represent the 2nd, 3rd and bottom 25% earners, and women form 50 to 70 percent of each of those three quartiles.

To read this chart properly, the reader must first do one calculation. Women represent about 60% of the top 25% earners in the public sector. Is that good or bad? This depends on the overall representation of women in the public sector. If the sector employs 75 percent women overall, then the 60 percent does not look good but if it employs 40 percent women, then the same value of 60% tells us that the female employees are disproportionately found in the top 25% earners.

That means the reader must compare each value in the pie chart against the overall proportion of women, which is learned from the average of the four quartiles.

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In the chart below, I make this relative comparison explicit. The overall proportion of women in each industry is shown using an open dot. Then the graphic displays two bars, one for the Top 25% earners, and one for the Bottom 25% earners. The bars show the gap between those quartiles and the overall female proportion. For the top earners, the size of the red bars shows the degree of under-representation of women while for the bottom earners, the size of the gray bars shows the degree of over-representation of women.

The net sum of the bar lengths is a plausible measure of gender inequality.

The industries are sorted from the ones employing fewer women (at the top) to the ones employing the most women (at the bottom). An alternative is to sort by total bar lengths. In the original Bloomberg chart - the small multiples of pie charts, the industries are sorted by the proportion of women in the bottom 25% pay quartile, from smallest to largest.

In making this dataviz, I elected to ignore the middle 50%. This is not a problem since any quartile above the average must be compensated by a different quartile below the average.

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The challenge of complex datasets is discovering simple ways to convey the underlying message. This usually requires quite a bit of upfront analytics, data transformation, and lots of sketching.

 

 

Finding meaning in Big Blue California

Via Twitter, Pat complained that this Bloomberg graphic is confusing:

The accompanying article is here. The gist of the report is that electric cars are much more popular on the West coast because the fuel efficiency of such cars goes down dramatically in colder climates. (Well, there are political reasons too, also discussed in the article.)

What makes this chart confusing?

Our eyes are drawn to big blue California, and the big number 25,295. The blue block raises three questions: first, how do we interpret that 25,295 number? How big is it? To what should we compare the number? Second, we notice a blending of labels--California is the only label of a state while all other labels are of regions. Third, the number under West is 31,783, even larger than 25,295 although it gets a smaller font size, a black-and-white treatment, and a seemingly small allocation of space.

It takes a little time to figure out the structure of the graphic. That the baseline is a treemap with the regions, and big blue California is a highlight that sits within the West region.

Tufte would not love the "moivremoire"  patterns, nor do I. I'd have left the background of the entire right side plain white.

I fail to see why this treemap form is preferred to a simple bar chart.

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As I play around with the data, basically playing with stacking the data, I found a way to make a more engaging graphic. This new graphic builds off an insight from this data: that the number of electric cars sold in California is more than all other states combined. So here you go:

Since the article attributes the gap in sales to regional temperature, an even better illustration should bring in temperature data.

 

Putting a final touch on Bloomberg's terrific chart of social movements

My friend Rhonda D. wins a prize for submitting a good chart. This is Bloomberg's take on the current Supreme Court case on gay marriage (link). Their designer places this movement in the context of prior social movements such as women's suffrage and inter-racial marriage.

Previously, I mentioned New York Times' coverage using "tile maps." While the Times places geography front and center, Bloomberg prefers to highlight the time scale. (In the bottom section of Bloomberg's presentation, they use tile maps as well.)

These are the little things I love about the graphic shown above:

• The very long time horizon really allows us to see our own lifetime as a small section of the history of the nation
• The gray upper envelope showing the size of the union is essential background data presented subtly
• The inclusion of "prohibition" representing a movement that failed (I wish they had included more examples of movements that do not succeed)
• The open circle and arrow indicators to differentiate between ongoing and settled issues

They should have let the movements finish by connecting the open circles to the upper envelope. Like this:

This makes the steepness of the lines jump out even more. In addition, it makes a distinction between the movements that succeeded and the movement that failed. (Prohibition was repealed in 1933. The line between 1920 and 1933 could be more granular if such data are available.)