Type D charts

A twitter follower sent the following chart:

It's odd to place the focus on China when the U.S. line is much higher, and the growth in spending in the last few years in the U.S. is much higher than the growth rate in China.

In the Trifecta Checkup, this chart is Type D (link): the data are at odds with the message of the chart. The intended message likely is China is building up its military in an alarming way. This dataset does not support such a conclusion.

The visual design of the chart can't be faulted though. It's clean, and restrained. It even places line labels at the end of each line. Also, the topic of the chart - the arms race - is unambiguous.

One fix is to change the message to bring it in line with the data. If the question being addressed is which country spends the most on the military, or which country has been raising spending at the fastest rate, then the above chart is appropriate.

If the question is about spending in China, then a different measure such as average annual spending increase may work.

Neither solution requires changing the visual form. That's why data visualization excellence is more than just selecting the right chart form.

Start at zero, or start at wherever

Andrew's post about start-at-zero helps me refine my own thinking on this evergreen topic.

The specific example he gave is this one:

The dataset is a numeric variable (y) with values over time (x). The minimum numeric value is around 3 and the range of values is from around 3 to just above 20. His advice is "If zero is in the neighborhood, invite it in". (Link)

The rule, as usual, sounds simpler than it really is. In the discussion, Andrew highlights several considerations.

Is zero a meaningful reference value? In his example, we assume it is and so we invite zero in. But, as Andrew also says, if zero is meaningless, then recall the invitation. So context must be accounted for.

In Chapter 1 of Numbersense (link), I looked at some SAT score data of applicants to competitive colleges. Is zero a meaningful reference value for SAT scores? Someone might argue yes, since it is the theoretical minimum score that anyone could get from the test. Any statistician will likely say no, since a competitive college will have never seen an applicant submitting a score of zero, or anywhere close to zero. Thus, starting such a chart at zero inserts a lot of whitespace and draws attention to a useless insight - how far above the theoretical worst performer is someone's score.

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What about the left panel of Andrew's chart makes us uncomfortable? I ask myself this question. My answer is that the horizontal axis highlights an arbitrary value that distracts from the key patterns of the data.

As shown below, the arbitrary value is ~2.5. This is utterly meaningless.

What if 0 is also a meaningless value for this dataset? I'd recommend "bench the axis". Like this:

An axis is a tool to help readers understand a chart. If it isn't serving a function, an axis doesn't need to be there. When I choose a line chart for time-series data, I'm drawing attention to temporal change in the numeric values, or the range of values. I'm not saying something about the values relative to some reference number.

From this example, we also see that the horizontal axis should not be regarded as a hanger for time labels. Time labels can exist by themselves.

 

 

How does the U.K. vote in the U.N.?

Through my twitter feed, I found my way to this chart, made by jamie_bio.

This is produced using R code even though it looks like a slide.

The underlying dataset concerns votes at the United Nations on various topics. Someone has already classified these topics. Jamie looked at voting blocs, specifically, countries whose votes agree most often or least often with the U.K.

If you look at his Github, this is one in a series of works he produced to hone his dataviz skills. Ultimately, I think this effort can benefit from some re-thinking. However, I also appreciate the work he has put into this.

Let's start with the things I enjoyed.

Given the dataset, I imagine the first visual one might come up with is a heatmap that shows countries in rows and topics in columns. That would work ok, as any standard chart form would but it would be a data dump that doesn't tell a story. There are almost 200 countries in the entire dataset. The countries can only be ordered in one way so if it's ordered for All Votes, it's not ordered for any of the other columns.

What Jamie attempts here is story-telling. The design leads the reader through a narrative. We start by reading the how-to-read-this box on the top left. This tells us that he's using a lunar eclipse metaphor. A full circle in blue indicates 0% agreement while a full circle in white indicates 100% agreement. The five circles signal that he's binning the agreement percentages into five discrete buckets, which helps simplify our understanding of the data.

Then, our eyes go to the circle of circles, labelled "All votes". This is roughly split in half, with the left side showing mostly blue and the right showing mostly white. That's because he's extracting the top 5 and bottom 5 countries, measured by their vote alignment with the U.K. The countries names are clearly labelled.

Next, we see the votes broken up by topics. I'm assuming not all topics are covered but six key topics are highlighted on the right half of the page.

What I appreciate about this effort is the thought process behind how to deliver a message to the audience. Selecting a specific subset that addresses a specific question. Thinning the materials in a way that doesn't throw the kitchen sink at the reader. Concocting the circular layout that presents a pleasing way of consuming the data.

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Now, let me talk about the things that need more work.

I'm not convinced that he got his message across. What is the visual telling us? Half of the cricle are aligned with the U.K. while half aren't so the U.K. sits on the fence on every issue? But this isn't the message. It's a bit of a mirage because the designer picked out the top 5 and bottom 5 countries. The top 5 are surely going to be voting almost 100% with the U.K. while the bottom 5 are surely going to be disagreeing with the U.K. a lot.

I did a quick sketch to understand the whole distribution:

This is not intended as a show-and-tell graphic, just a useful way of exploring the dataset. You can see that Arms Race/Disarmament and Economic Development are "average" issues that have the same form as the "All issues" line. There are a small number of countries that are extremely aligned with the UK, and then about 50 countries that are aligned over 50% of the time, then the other 150 countries are within the 30 to 50% aligned. On human rights, there is less alignment. On Palestine, there is more alignment.

What the above chart shows is that the top 5 and bottom 5 countries both represent thin slithers of this distribution, which is why in the circular diagrams, there is little differentiation. The two subgroups are very far apart but within each subgroup, there is almost no variation.

Another issue is the lunar eclipse metaphor. It's hard to wrap my head around a full white circle indicating 100% agreement while a full blue circle shows 0% agreement.

In the diagrams for individual topics, the two-letter acronyms for countries are used instead of the country names. A decoder needs to be provided, or just print the full names.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surging gas prices

A reader finds this chart hard to parse:

The chart shows the trend in gas prices in New York in the past two years.

This is a case in which the simple line chart works very well.

I added annotations as the reasons behind the decline and rise in prices are reasonably clear. 

One should be careful when formatting dates. The legend of the original chart looks like this:

In the U.S., dates typically use a M/D/Y format. The above dates are ambiguous. "Aug 19" can be August 19th or August, xx19.

Asymmetry and orientation

An author in Significance claims that a single season of Premier League football without live spectators is enough to prove that the so-called home field advantage is really a live-spectator advantage.

The following chart depicts the data going back many seasons:

I find this bar chart challenging.

It plots the ratio of home wins to away wins using an odds scale, which is not intuitive. The odds scale (probability of success divided by probability of failure) runs from 0 to positive infinity, with 1 being a special value indicating equal odds. But all the values for which away wins exceed home wins are squeezed into the interval between 0 and 1 while the values for which home wins exceed away wins are laid out between 1 and infinity. So it's an inherently asymmetric graphic for a symmetric formula.

The section labeled "more away wins than home wins" are filled with red bars for all those seasons with positive home field advantage while the most recent season, the outlier, has a shorter bar in that section than the rest.

Here's an alternative view:

I have incorporated dual axes here - but both axes are different only by scaling. There are 380 games in a Premier League season so the percentage scale is just a re-expression of the counts.

 

 

Charts that ask questions about the German election

In the prior post about Canadian elections, I suggested that designers expand beyond plots of one variable at a time. Today, I look at a project by DataWrapper on the German elections which happened this week. Thanks to long-time blog supporter Antonio for submitting the chart.

The following is the centerpiece of Lisa's work:

CDU/CSU is Angela Merkel's party, represented by the black color. The chart answers one question only: did polls correctly predict election results?

The time period from 1994 to 2021 covers eight consecutive elections (counting the one this week). There are eight vertical blocks on the chart representing each administration. The right vertical edge of each block coincides with an election. The chart is best understood as the superposition of two time series.

You can trace the first time series by following a step function - let your eyes follow the flat lines between elections. This dataset shows the popular vote won by the party at each election, with the value updated after each election. The last vertical block represents an election that has not yet happened when this chart was created. As explained in the footnote, Lisa took the average poll result for the last month leading up to the 2021 election - in the context of this chart, she made the assumption that this cycle of polls will be 100% accurate.

The second time series corresponds to the ragged edges of the gray and black areas. If you ignore the colors, and the flat lines, you'll discover that the ragged edges form a contiguous data series. This line encodes the average popularity of the CDU/CSU party according to election polls.

Thus, the area between the step function and the ragged line measures the gap between polls and election day results. When the polls underestimate the actual outcome, the area is colored gray; when the polls are over-optimistic, the area is colored black. In the last completed election of 2017, Merkel's party underperformed relative to the polls. In fact, the polls in the entire period between the 2013 and 2017 uniformly painted a rosier picture for CDU/CSU than actually happened.

The last vertical block is interpreted a little differently. Since the reference level is the last month of polls (rather than the actual popular vote), the abundance of black indicates that Merkel's party has been suffering from declining poll numbers on the approach of this week's election.

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The picture shown above seems to indicate that these polls are not particularly good. It appears they have limited ability to self-correct within each election cycle. Aside from the 1998-2002 period, the area colors seldom changed within each cycle. That means if the first polling average overestimated the party's popularity, then all subsequent polling averages were also optimistic. (The original post focused on a single pollster, which exacerbates this issue. Compare the following chart with the above, and you'll find even fewer color changes within cycle here:

Each pollster may be systematically biased but the poll aggregate is less so.)

 

Here's the chart for SDP, which is CDU/CSU's biggest opponent, and likely winner of this week's election:

Overall, this chart has similar features as the CDU/CSU chart. The most recent polls seem to favor the SPD - the pink area indicates that the older polls of this cycle underestimates the last month's poll result.

Both these parties are in long-term decline, with popularity dropping from the 40% range in the 1990s to the 20% range in the 2020s.

One smaller party that seems to have gained followers is the Green party:

The excess of dark green, however, does not augur well for this election.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

***

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.

 

 

 

A little stitch here, a great graphic is knitted

The Wall Street Journal used the following graphic to compare hurricanes Ida and Katrina (link to paywalled article).

This graphic illustrates the power of visual communications. Readers can learn a lot from it.

The paths of the storms can be compared. The geographical locations of the landfalls are shown. The strengthening of wind speeds as the hurricanes moved toward Louisiana is also displayed. Ida is clearly a lesser storm than Katrina: its wind speed never reached Category 5, and is generally lower at comparable time points.

The greatest feature of the WSJ graphic is how the designer stitches the two plots into one graphic. The anchors are two time points: when each storm attained enough wind speed to be classified as a hurricane (indicated by open dots), and when each storm made landfall in Louisiana. It is this little-noticed feature that makes it so easy to place each plot in context of the other.

Bravo!

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.

 

Working hard at clarity

As I am preparing another blog post about the pandemic, I came across the following data graphic, recently produced by the CDC for a vaccine advisory board meeting:

This is not an example of effective visual communications.

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For one thing, readers are directed to scour the footnotes to figure out what's going on. If we ignore those for the moment, we see clusters of bubbles that have remained pretty stable from December 2020 to August 2021. The data concern some measure of Americans' intent to take the COVID-19 vaccine. That much we know.

There may have been a bit of an upward trend between January and May, although if you were shown the clusters for December, February and April, you'd think the trend's been pretty flat. 

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But those colors? What could they represent? You'd surely have to fish this one out of the footnotes. Specifically, this obtuse sentence: "Surveys with multiple time points are shown with the same color bubble for each time point." I had to read it several times. I think it simply means "Color represents the pollster." 

Then it adds: "Surveys with only one time point are shown in gray." which simply means "All pollsters who have only one entry in the dataset are grouped together and shown in gray."

Another problem with this chart is over-plotting. Look at the July cluster. It's impossible to tell how many polls were conducted in July because the circles pile on top of one another. 

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The appearance of the flat trend is a result of two unfortunate decisions made by the designer. If I retained the chart form, I'd have produced something that looks like this:

The first design choice is to expand the vertical axis to range from 0% to 100%. This effectively squeezes all the bubbles into a small range.

The second design choice is to enlarge the bubbles causing copious amount of overlapping. 

In particular, this decision blows up the Pew poll (big pink bubble) that contained 10 times the sample size of most of the other polls. The Pew outcome actually came in at 70% but the top of the pink bubble extends to over 80%. Because of this, the outlier poll of December 2020 - which surprisingly printed the highest number of all polls in the entire time window - no longer looks special. 

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Now, let's see what else we can do to enhance this chart. 

I don't like how bubble size is used to encode the sample size. It creates a weird sensation for anyone who's familiar with sampling errors, and confidence regions. The Pew poll with 10 times the sample size is the most reliable poll of them all. Reliability means the error bars around the Pew poll outcome is the smallest of them all. I tend to think of the area around a point estimate as showing the sampling error so the Pew poll would be a dot, showing the high precision of that estimate. 

But that won't work because larger bubbles catch more of the reader's attention. So, in the following version, all dots have the same size. I encode reliability in the opacity of the color. The darker dots are polls that are more reliable, that have larger sample sizes.

Two of the pollsters have more frequent polling than others. In this next version, I highlighted those two, which reveals the trend better.