Here's a radar chart that works, sort of

In the same Reuters article that featured the speedometer chart which I discussed in this blog post (link), the author also deployed a small multiples of radar charts.

These radar charts are supposed to illustrate the article's theme that "European countries are racing to fill natural gas storage sites ahead of winter."

Here's the aggregate chart that shows all countries:

In general, I am not a fan of radar charts. When I first looked at this chart, I also disliked it. But keep reading because I eventually decided that this usage is an exception. One just needs to figure out how to read it.

One reason why I dislike radar charts is that they always come with a lot of non-data-ink baggage. We notice that the months of the year are plotted in a circle starting at the top. They marked off the start of the war on Feb 24, 2022 in red. Then, they place the dotted circle, which represents the 80% target gas storage amount.

The trick is to avoid interpreting the areas, or the shapes of the blue and gray patches. I know, they look cool and grab our attention but in the context of conveying data, they are meaningless.

Instead of areas, focus on the boundaries of those patches. Don't follow one boundary around the circle. Pick a point in time, corresponding to a line between the center of the circle and the outermost circle, and look at the gap between the two lines. In the diagram shown right, I marked off the two relevant points on the day of the start of the war.

From this, we observe that across Europe, the gas storage was far less than the 80% target (recently set).

By comparing two other points (the blue and gray boundaries), we see that during February, gas storage is at a seasonal low, and in 2022, it is on the low side of the 5-year average. 

However, the visual does not match well with the theme of the article! While the gap between the blue and gray boundaries decreased since the start of the war, the blue boundary does not exceed the historical average, and does not get close to 80% until August, a month in which gas storage reaches 80% in a typical year.

This is example of a chart in which there is a misalignment between the Q and the V corners of the Trifecta Checkup (link).

The question/message is that Europeans are reacting to the war by increasing their gas storage beyond normal. The visual actually says that they are increasing the gas storage as per normal.

***

As I noted before, when read in a particular way, these radar charts serve their purpose, which is more than can be said for most radar charts.

The designer made several wise choices:

Instead of drawing one ring for each year of data, the designer averaged the past 5 years and turned that into one single ring (patch). You can imagine what this radar chart would look like if the prior data were not averaged: hoola hoop mania!

Simplifying the data in this way also makes the small multiples work. The designer uses the aggregate chart as a legend/how to read this. And in a further section below, the designer plots individual countries, without the non-data-ink baggage:

Thanks againto longtime reader Antonio R. who submitted this chart.

Happy Labor Day weekend for those in the U.S.!

 

 

 

Speedometer charts: love or hate

Pie chart hate is tired. In this post, I explain my speedometer hate. (Also called gauges,  dials)

Next to pie charts, speedometers are perhaps the second most beloved chart species found on business dashboards. Here is a typical example:

 

For this post, I found one on Reuters about natural gas in Europe. (Thanks to long-time contributor Antonio R. for the tip.)

The reason for my dislike is the inefficiency of this chart form. In classic Tufte-speak, the speedometer chart has a very poor data-to-ink ratio. The entire chart above contains just one datum (73%). Most of the ink are spilled over non-data things.

This single number has a large entourage:

- the curved axis
- ticks on the axis
- labels on the scale
- the dial
- the color segments
- the reference level "EU target"

These are not mere decorations. Taking these elements away makes it harder to understand what's on the chart.

Here is the chart without the curved axis:

Here is the chart without axis labels:

Here is the chart without ticks:

When the tick labels are present, the chart still functions.

Here is the chart without the dial:

The datum is redundantly encoded in the color segments of the "axis".

Here is the chart without the dial or the color segments:

If you find yourself stealing a peek at the chart title below, you're not alone.

All versions except one increases our cognitive load. This means the entourage is largely necessary if one encodes the single number in a speedometer chart.

The problem with the entourage is that readers may resort to reading the text rather than the chart.

***

The following is a minimalist version of the Reuters chart:

I removed the axis labels and the color segments. The number 73% is shown using the dial angle.

The next chart adds back the secondary message about the EU target, as an axis label, and uses color segments to show the 73% number.

Like pie charts, there are limited situations in which speedometer charts are acceptable. But most of the ones we see out there are just not right.

***

One acceptable situation is to illustrate percentages or proportions, which is what the EU gas chart does. Of course, in that situation, one can alo use a pie chart without shame.

For illustrating proportions, I prefer to use a full semicircle, instead of the circular sector of arbitrary angle as Reuters did. The semicircle lends itself to easy marks of 25%, 50%, 75%, etc, eliminating the need to print those tick labels.

***

One use case to avoid is numeric data.

Take the regional sales chart pulled randomly from a Web search above:

These charts are completely useless without the axis labels.

Besides, because the span of the axis isn't 0% to 100%, every tick mark must be labelled with the numeric value. That's a lot of extra ink used to display a single value!

Another reminder that aggregate trends hide information

The last time I looked at the U.S. employment situation, it was during the pandemic. The data revealed the deep flaws of the so-called "not in labor force" classification. This classification is used to dehumanize unemployed people who are declared "not in labor force," in which case they are neither employed nor unemployed -- just not counted at all in the official unemployment (or employment) statistics.

The reason given for such a designation was that some people just have no interest in working, or even looking for a job. Now they are not merely discouraged - as there is a category of those people. In theory, these people haven't been looking for a job for so long that they are no longer visible to the bean counters at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What happened when the pandemic precipitated a shutdown in many major cities across America? The number of "not in labor force" shot up instantly, literally within a few weeks. That makes a mockery of the reason for such a designation. See this post for more.

***

The data we saw last time was up to April, 2020. That's more than two years old.

So I have updated the charts to show what has happened in the last couple of years.

Here is the overall picture.

In this new version, I centered the chart at the 1990 data. The chart features two key drivers of the headline unemployment rate - the proportion of people designated "invisible", and the proportion of those who are considered "employed" who are "part-time" workers.

The last two recessions have caused structural changes to the labor market. From 1990 to late 2000s, which included the dot-com bust, these two metrics circulated within a small area of the chart. The Great Recession of late 2000s led to a huge jump in the proportion called "invisible". It also pushed the proportion of part-timers to all0time highs. The proportion of part-timers has fallen although it is hard to interpret from this chart alone - because if the newly invisible were previously part-time employed, then the same cause can be responsible for either trend.

Readers of Numbersense (link) might be reminded of a trick used by school deans to pump up their US News rankings. Some schools accept lots of transfer students. This subpopulation is invisible to the US News statisticians since they do not factor into the rankings. The recent scandal at Columbia University also involves reclassifying students (see this post).

Zooming in on the last two years. It appears that the pandemic-related unemployment situation has reversed.

***

Let's split the data by gender.

American men have been stuck in a negative spiral since the 1990s. With each recession, a higher proportion of men are designated BLS invisibles.

In the grid system set up in this scatter plot, the top right corner is the worse of all worlds - the work force has shrunken and there are more part-timers among those counted as employed. The U.S. men are not exiting this quadrant any time soon.

***
What about the women?

If we compare 1990 with 2022, the story is not bad. The female work force is gradually reaching the same scale as in 1990 while the proportion of part-time workers have declined.

However, celebrating the above is to ignore the tremendous gains American women made in the 1990s and 2000s. In 1990, only 58% of women are considered part of the work force - the other 42% are not working but they are not counted as unemployed. By 2000, the female work force has expanded to include about 60% with similar proportions counted as part-time employed as in 1990. That's great news.

The Great Recession of the late 2000s changed that picture. Just like men, many women became invisible to BLS. The invisible proportion reached 44% in 2015 and have not returned to anywhere near the 2000 level. Fewer women are counted as part-time employed; as I said above, it's hard to tell whether this is because the women exiting the work force previously worked part-time.

***

The color of the dots in all charts are determined by the headline unemployment number. Blue represents low unemployment. During the 1990-2022 period, there are three moments in which unemployment is reported as 4 percent or lower. These charts are intended to show that an aggregate statistic hides a lot of information. The three times at which unemployment rate reached historic lows represent three very different situations, if one were to consider the sizes of the work force and the number of part-time workers.

 

P.S. [8-15-2022] Some more background about the visualization can be found in prior posts on the blog: here is the introduction, and here's one that breaks it down by race. Chapter 6 of Numbersense (link) gets into the details of how unemployment rate is computed, and the implications of the choices BLS made.

P.S. [8-16-2022] Corrected the axis title on the charts (see comment below). Also, added source of data label.

Funnels and scatters

I took a peek at some of the work submitted by Ray Vella's students in his NYU dataviz class recently.

The following chart by Hosanah Bryan caught my eye:

The data concern the GDP gap between rich and poor regions in various countries. In some countries, especially in the U.K., the gap is gigantic. In other countries, like Spain and Sweden, the gap is much smaller.

The above chart uses a funnel metaphor to organize the data, although the funnel does not add more meaning (not that it has to). Between that, the color scheme and the placement of text, it's visually clean and pleasant to look at.

The data being plotted are messy. They are not actual currency values of GDP. Each number is an index, and represents the relative level of the GDP gap in a given year and country. The gap being shown by the colored bars are differences in these indices 15 years apart. (The students were given this dataset to work with.)

So the chart is very hard to understand if one focuses on the underlying data. Nevertheless, the same visual form can hold other datasets which are less complicated.

One can nitpick about the slight misrepresentation of the values due to the slanted edges on both sides of the bars. This is yet another instance of the tradeoff between beauty and precision.

***

The next chart by Liz Delessert engages my mind for a different reason.

The scatter plot sets up four quadrants. The top right is "everyone gets richer". The top left, where most of the dots lie, is where "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer".  This chart shows a thoughtfulness about organizing the data, and the story-telling.

The grid setup cues readers toward a particular way of looking at the data.

But power comes with responsibility. Such scatter plots are particularly susceptible to the choice of data, in this case, countries. It is tempting to conclude that there are no countries in which everyone gets poorer. But that statement more likely tells us more about which countries were chosen than the real story.

I like to see the chart applied to other data transformations that are easier. For example, we can start with the % change in GDP computed separately for rich and for poor. Then we can form a ratio of these two percent changes.

 

 

Metaphors give and take

Another submission came in from Euro Twitter. The following chart is probably from Germany:

As JB noted, this chart explains a financial pyramid scheme. I believe the numbers on the left are participants while the numbers on the right are the potential ill-gotten gains per person. The longer the pyramid scheme lasts, the more people participate, the more money flows to the top.

The pyramid is a natural metaphor for visualizing pyramid schemes. The levels of the pyramid correspond to levels of a pyramid scheme - the newly recruited participants expand the base while passing revenues up the pyramid.

***

The chart fails because it's not really a dataviz. There are exactly three bars that are scaled according to data. Everything else is presented as data labels.

Let's look at the two data series separately:

Each series is exponentially growing (in opposite directions). [Some of the data labels for participants may be incorrect.]

Unfortunately, the triangle is not a good medium to display exponential growth. In fact, the triangular structure imposes a linear growth constraint. The length of the base is directly proportional to the height from the top. As one traverses downwards level by level, the width of the base grows linearly - not exponentially.

To illustrate exponential growth, the edge of the triangle cannot be a straight line - it has to be s steep curve!

While natural, the pyramid metaphor is also severely restricting. The choice of chart form has unexpected consequences.

 

Who trades with Sweden

It's great that the UN is publishing dataviz but it can do better than this effort:

Certain problems are obvious. The country names turned sideways. The meaningless use of color. The inexplicable sequencing of the country/region.

Some problems are subtler. "Area, nes" - upon research - is a custom term used by UN Trade Statistics, meaning "not elsewhere specified".

The gridlines are debatable. Their function is to help readers figure out the data values if they care. The design omitted the top and bottom gridlines, which makes it hard to judge the values for USA (dark blue), Netherlands (orange), and Germany (gray).

See here, where I added the top gridline.

Now, we can see this value is around 3.6, just over the halfway point between gridlines.

***

A central feature of trading statistics is "balance". The following chart makes it clear that the positive numbers outweigh the negative numbers in the above chart.

At the time I made the chart, I wasn't sure how to interpret the gap of 1.3%. Looking at the chart again, I think it's saying Sweden has a trade surplus equal to that amount.

Variance is a friend of dataviz

Seven years ago, I wrote a post about "invariance" in data visualization, which is something we should avoid (link). Yesterday, Business Insider published the following chart in an article about rising gas prices (link):

The map shows the average prices at the pump in seven regions of the United States. 

This chart is succeeded by the following map:

This second map shows the change in average gas prices in the same seven regions.

This design is invariant to the data! While the data change, the visualization looks identical. That's because the data are not encoded to any visual element - they are just printed as labels.

 

Selecting the right analysis plan is the first step to good dataviz

It's a new term, and my friend Ray Vella shared some student projects from his NYU class on infographics. There's always something to learn from these projects.

The starting point is a chart published in the Economist a few years ago.

This is a challenging chart to read. To save you the time, the following key points are pertinent:

a) income inequality is measured by the disparity between regional averages

b) the incomes are given in a double index, a relative measure. For each country and year combination, the average national GDP is set to 100. A value of 150 means the richest region of Spain has an average income that is 50% higher than Spain's national average in the year 2015.

The original chart - as well as most of the student work - is based on a specific analysis plan. The difference in the index values between the richest and poorest regions is used as a measure of the degree of income inequality, and the change in the difference in the index values over time, as a measure of change in the degree of income inequality over time. That's as big a mouthful as the bag of words sounds.

This analysis plan can be summarized as:

1) all incomes -> relative indices, at each region-year combination
2) inequality = rich - poor region gap, at each region-year combination
3) inequality over time = inequality in 2015 - inequality in 2000, for each country
4) country difference = inequality in country A - inequality in country B, for each year

***

One student, J. Harrington, looks at the data through an alternative lens that brings clarity to the underlying data. Harrington starts with change in income within the richest regions (then the poorest regions), so that a worsening income inequality should imply that the richest region is growing incomes at a faster clip than the poorest region.

This alternative analysis plan can be summarized as:
1) change in income over time for richest regions for each country
2) change in income over time for poorest regions for each country
3) inequality = change in income over time: rich - poor, for each country

The restructuring of the analysis plan makes a big difference!

Here is one way to show this alternative analysis:

The underlying data have not changed but the reader's experience is transformed.

Deficient deficit depiction

A twitter user alerted me to this chart put out by the Biden adminstration trumpeting a reduction in the budget deficit from 2020 to 2021:

This column chart embodies a form that is popular in many presentations, including in scientific journals. It's deficient in so many ways it's a marvel how it continues to live.

There are just two numbers: -3132 and -2772. Their difference is $360 billion, which is less than just over 10 percent of the earlier number. It's not clear what any data graphic can add.

Indeed, the chart does not do much. It obscures the actual data. What is the budget deficit in 2020? Readers must look at the axis labels, and judge that it's about a quarter of the way between 3000 and 3500. Five hundred quartered is 125. So it's roughly $3.125 trillion. Similarly, the 2021 number is slightly above the halfway point between 2,500 and 3,000.

These numbers are upside down. Taller columns are bad! Shortening the columns is good. It's all counter intuitive.

Column charts encode data in the heights of the columns. The designer apparently wants readers to believe the deficit has been cut by about a third.

As usual, this deception is achieved by cutting the column chart off at its knees. Removing equal sections of each column destroys the propotionality of the heights.

Why hold back? Here's a version of the chart showing the deficit was cut by half:

The relative percent reduction depends on where the baseline is placed. The only defensible baseline is the zero baseline. That's the only setting under which the relative percent reduction is accurately represented visually.

***

This same problem presents itself subtly in Covid-19 vaccine studies. I explain in this post, which I rate as one of my best Covid-19 posts. Check it out!

 

 

Superb tile map offering multiple avenues for exploration

Here's a beauty by WSJ Graphics:

The article is here.

This data graphic illustrates the power of the visual medium. The underlying dataset is complex: power production by type of source by state by month by year. That's more than 90,000 numbers. They all reside on this graphic.

Readers amazingly make sense of all these numbers without much effort.

It starts with the summary chart on top.

The designer made decisions. The data are presented in relative terms, as proportion of total power production. Only the first and last years are labeled, thus drawing our attention to the long-term trend. The order of the color blocks is carefully selected so that the cleaner sources are listed at the top and the dirtier sources at the bottom. The order of the legend labels mirrors the color blocks in the area chart.

It takes only a few seconds to learn that U.S. power production has largely shifted away from coal with most of it substituted by natural gas. Other than wind, the green sources of power have not gained much ground during these years - in a relative sense.

This summary chart serves as a reading guide for the rest of the chart, which is a tile map of all fifty states. Embedded in the tile map is a small-multiples arrangement.

***

The map offers multiple avenues for exploration.

Some readers may look at specific states. For example, California.

Currently, about half of the power production in California come from natural gas. Notably, there is no coal at all in any of these years. In addition to wind, solar energy has also gained. All of these insights come without the need for any labels or gridlines!

Browsing around California, readers find different patterns in other Western states like Oregon and Washington.

Hydroelectric energy is the dominant source in those two states, with wind gradually taking share.

At this point, readers realize that the summary chart up top hides remarkable state-level variations.

***

There are other paths through the map.

Some readers may scan the whole map, seeking patterns that pop out.

One such pattern is the cluster of states that use coal. In most of these states, the proportion of coal has declined.

Yet another path exists for those interested in specific sources of power.

For example, the trend in nuclear power usage is easily followed by tracking the purple. South Carolina, Illinois and New Hampshire are three states that rely on nuclear for more than half of its power.

I wonder what happened in Vermont about 8 years ago.

The chart says they renounced nuclear energy. Here is some history. This one-time event caused a disruption in the time series, unique on the entire map.

***

This work is wonderful. Enjoy it!