Ridings, polls, elections, O Canada

Stephen Taylor reached out to me about his work to visualize Canadian elections data. I took a look. I appreciate the labor of love behind this project.

He led with a streamgraph, which presents a quick overview of relative party strengths over time.

I am no Canadian election expert, and I did a bare minimum of research in writing this blog. From this chart, I learn that:

• the Canadians have an irregular election schedule
• Canada has a two party plus breadcrumbs system
• The two dominant parties are Liberals and Conservatives. The Liberals currently hold just less than half of the seats. The Conservatives have more than half of the seats not held by Liberals
• The Conservative party (maybe) rebranded as "progressive conservative" for several decades. The Reform/Alliance party was (maybe) a splinter movement within the Conservatives as well.
• Since the "width" of the entire stream increased over time, I'm guessing the number of seats has expanded

That's quite a bit of information obtained at a glance. This shows the power of data visualization. Notice Stephen didn't even have to include a "how to read this" box.

The streamgraph form has its limitations.

The feature that makes it more attractive than an area chart is its middle anchoring, resulting in a form of symmetry. The same feature produces erroneous intuition - the red patch draws out a declining trend; the reader must fight the urge to interpret the lines and focus on the areas.

The breadcrumbs are well hidden. The legend below discloses that the Green Party holds 3 seats currently. The party has never held enough seats to appear on the streamgraph though.

The bars showing proportions in the legend is a very nice touch. (The numbers appear messed up - I have to ask Stephen whether the seats shown are current values, or some kind of historical average.) I am a big fan of informative legends.

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The next featured chart is a dot plot of polling results since 2020.

One can see a three-tier system: the two main parties, then the NDP (yellow) is the clear majority of the minority, and finally you have a host of parties that don't poll over 10%.

It looks like the polls are favoring the Conservatives over the Liberals in this election but it may be an election-day toss-up.

The purple dots represent "PPC" which is a party not found elsewhere on the page.

This chart is clear as crystal because of the structure of the underlying data. It just amazes me that the polls are so highly correlated. For example, across all these polls, the NDP has never once polled better than either the Liberals or the Conservatives, and in addition, it has never polled worse than any of the small parties.

What I'd like to see is a chart that merges the two datasets, addressing the question of how well these polls predicted the actual election outcomes.

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The project goes very deep as Stephen provides charts for individual "ridings" (perhaps similar to U.S. precincts).

Here we see population pyramids for Vancouver Center, versus British Columbia (Province), versus Canada.

This riding has a large surplus of younger people in their twenties and thirties. Be careful about the changing scales though. The relative difference in proportions are more drastic than visually displayed because the maximum values (5%) on the Province and Canada charts are half that on the Riding chart (10%). Imagine squashing the Province and Canada charts to half their widths.

Analyses of income and rent/own status are also provided.

This part of the dashboard exhibits a problem common in most dashboards - they present each dimension of the data separately and miss out on the more interesting stuff: the correlation between dimensions. Do people in their twenties and thirties favor specific parties? Do richer people vote for certain parties?

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The riding-level maps are the least polished part of the site. This is where I'm looking for a "how to read it" box.

It took me a while to realize that the colors represent the parties. If I haven't come in from the front page, I'd have been totally lost.

Next, I got confused by the use of the word "poll". Clicking on any of the subdivisions bring up details of an actual race, with party colors, candidates and a donut chart showing proportions. The title gives a "poll id" and the name of the riding in parentheses. Since the poll id changes as I mouse over different subdivisions, I'm wondering whether a "poll" is the term for a subdivision of a riding. A quick wiki search indicates otherwise.

My best guess is the subdivisions are indicated by the numbers.

Back to the donut charts, I prefer a different sorting of the candidates. For this chart, the two most logical orderings are (a) order by overall popularity of the parties, fixed for all ridings and (b) order by popularity of the candidate, variable for each riding.

The map shown above gives the winner in each subdivision. This type of visualization dumps a lot of information. Stephen tackles this issue by offering a small multiples view of each party. Here is the Liberals in Vancouver.

Again, we encounter ambiguity about the color scheme. Liberals have been associated with a red color but we are faced with abundant yellow. After clicking on the other parties, you get the idea that he has switched to a divergent continuous color scale (red - yellow - green). Is red or green the higher value? (The answer is red.)

I'd suggest using a gray scale for these charts. The hardest decision is going to be the encoding between values and shading. Should each gray scale be different for each riding and each party?

If I were to take a guess, Stephen must have spent weeks if not months creating these maps (depending on whether he's full-time or part-time). What he has published here is a great start. Fine-tuning the issues I've mentioned may take more weeks or months more.

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Stephen is brave and smart to send this project for review. For one thing, he's got some free consulting. More importantly, we should always send work around for feedback; other readers can tell us where our blind spots are.

To read more, start with this post by Stephen in which he introduces his project.

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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%.

 

And you thought that pie chart was bad...

Vying for some of the worst charts of the year, Adobe came up with a few gems in its Digital Trends Survey. This was a tip from Nolan H. on Twitter.

There are many charts that should be featured; I'll focus on this one.

This is one of those survey questions that allow each respondent to select multiple responses so that adding up the percentages exceeds 100%. The survey asks people which of these futuristic products do they think is most important. There were two separate groups of respondents, consumers (lighter red) and businesses (darker red).

If, like me, you are a left-to-right, top-to-bottom reader, you'd have consumed this graphic in the following way:

The most important item is found in the lower bottom corner while the least important is placed first.

Here is a more sensible order of these objects:

To follow this order, our eyes must do this:

Now, let me say I like what they did with the top of the chart:

Put the legend above the chart because no one can understand it without first reading the legend.

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Data are embedded into part-circles (i.e. sectors)... but where do we find the data? The most obvious place to look for them is the areas of the sectors. But that's the wrong place. As I show in the explainer, the designer placed the data in the "height" - the distance from the peak point of the object to the horizontal baseline.

As a result of this choice, the areas of the sectors distort the data - they are proportional to the square of the data.

One simple way to figure out that your graphical objects have obscured the data is the self-sufficiency test. Remove all data labels from the chart, and ask if you still have something understandable.

With these unusual shapes, it's not easy to judge how much larger is one object from the next. That's why the data labels were included - the readers are looking at the data values, rather than the graphical objects. That's sad, if you are the designer.

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One last mystery. What decides the layering of the light vs dark red sectors?

This design always places the smaller object in front of the larger object. Recall that the light red is for consumers and dark red for businesses. The comparison between these disjoint segments is not as interesting as the comparison of different ratings of technologies with each segment. So it's unfortunate that this aspect may get more attention than it deserves. It's also a consequence of the chart form. If the light red is always placed in front, then in some panels (such as the middle one shown above), the light red completely blocks the dark red.

 

The time has arrived for cumulative charts

Long-time reader Scott S. asked me about this Washington Post chart that shows the disappearance of pediatric flu deaths in the U.S. this season:

The dataset behind this chart is highly favorable to the designer, because the signal in the data is so strong. This is a good chart. The key point is shown clearly right at the top, with an informative title. Gridlines are very restrained. I'd draw attention to the horizontal axis. The master stroke here is omitting the week labels, which are likely confusing to all but the people familiar with this dataset.

Scott suggested using a line chart. I agree. And especially if we plot cumulative counts, rather than weekly deaths. Here's a quick sketch of such a chart:

(On second thought, I'd remove the week numbers from the horizontal axis, and just go with the month labels. The Washington Post designer is right in realizing that those week numbers are meaningless to most readers.)

The vaccine trials have brought this cumulative count chart form to the mainstream. For anyone who have seen the vaccine efficacy charts, the interpretation of the panel of line charts should come naturally.

Instead of four plots, I prefer one plot with four superimposed lines. Like this:

 

 

 

Reading an infographic about our climate crisis

Let's explore an infographic by SCMP, which draws attention to the alarming temperature recorded at Verkhoyansk in Russia on June 20, 2020. The original work was on the back page of the printed newspaper, referred to in this tweet.

This view of the globe brings out the two key pieces of evidence presented in the infographic: the rise in temperature in unexpected places, and the shrinkage of the Arctic ice.

A notable design decision is to omit the color scale. On inspection, the scale is present - it was sewn into the graphic.

I applaud this decision as it does not take the reader's eyes away from the graphic. Some information is lost as the scale isn't presented in full details but I doubt many readers need those details.

A key takeaway is that the temperature in Verkhoyansk, which is on the edge of the Arctic Circle, was the same as in New Delhi in India on that day. We can see how the red was encroaching upon the Arctic Circle.

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Next, the rapid shrinkage of the Arctic ice is presented in two ways. First, a series of maps.

The annotations are pared to the minimum. The presentation is simple enough such that we can visually judge that the amount of ice cover has roughly halved from 1980 to 2009.

A numerical measure of the drop is provided on the side.

Then, a line chart reinforces this message.

The line chart emphasizes change over time while the series of maps reveals change over space.

This chart suggests that the year 2020 may break the record for the smallest ice cover since 1980. The maps of Australia and India provide context to interpret the size of the Arctic ice cover.

I'd suggest reversing the pink and black colors so as to refer back to the blue and pink lines in the globe above.

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The final chart shows the average temperature worldwide and in the Arctic, relative to a reference period (1981-2000).

This one is tough. It looks like an area chart but it should be read as a line chart. The darker line is the anomaly of Arctic average temperature while the lighter line is the anomaly of the global average temperature. The two series are synced except for a brief period around 1940. Since 2000, the temperatures have been dramatically rising above that of the reference period.

If this is a stacked area chart, then we'd interpret the two data series as summable, with the sum of the data series signifying something interesting. For example, the market shares of different web browsers sum to the total size of the market.

But the chart above should not be read as a stacked area chart because the outside envelope isn't the sum of the two anomalies. The problem is revealed if we try to articulate what the color shades mean.

On the far right, it seems like the dark shade is paired with the lighter line and represents global positive anomalies while the lighter shade shows Arctic's anomalies in excess of global. This interpretation only works if the Arctic line always sits above the global line. This pattern is broken in the late 1990s.

Around 1999, the Arctic's anomaly is negative while the global anomaly is positive. Here, the global anomaly gets the lighter shade while the Arctic one is blue.

One possible fix is to encode the size of the anomaly into the color of the line. The further away from zero, the darker the red/blue color.

 

 

Convincing charts showing containment measures work

The disorganized nature of U.S.'s response to the coronavirus pandemic has created a sort of natural experiment that allows data journalists to explore important scientific questions, such as the impact of containment measures on cases and hospitalizations. This New York Times article represents the best of such work.

The key finding of the analysis is beautifully captured by this set of scatter plots:

Each dot is a state. The cases (left plot) and hospitalizations (right plot) are plotted against the severity of containment measures for November. The negative correlation is unmistakable: the more containment measures taken, the lower the counts.

There are a few features worth noting.

The severity index came from a group at Oxford, and is a number between 0 and 100. The journalists decided to leave out the numerical labels, instead simply showing More and Fewer. This significantly reduces processing time. Readers won't be able to understand the index values anyway without reading the manual.

The index values are doubly encoded. They are first encoded by the location on the horizontal axis and redundantly encoded on the blue-red scale. Ordinarily, I do not like redundant encoding because the reader might assume a third dimension exists. In this case, I had no trouble with it.

The easiest way to see the effect is to ignore the muddy middle and focus on the two ends of the severity index. Those states with the fewest measures - South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa - are the worst in cases and hospitalizations while those states with the most measures - New York, Hawaii - are among the best. This comparison is similar to what is frequently done in scientific studies, e.g. when they say coffee is good for you, they typically compare heavy drinkers (4 or more cups a day) with non-drinkers, ignoring the moderate and light drinkers.

Notably, there is quite a bit of variability for any level of containment measures - roughly 50 cases per 100,000, and 25 hospitalizations per 100,000. This indicates that containment measures are not sufficient to explain the counts. For example, the hospitalization statistic is affected by the stock of hospital beds, which I assume differ by state.

Whenever we use a scatter plot, we run the risk of xyopia. This chart form invites readers to explain an outcome (y-axis values) using one explanatory variable (on x-axis). There is an assumption that all other variables are unimportant, which is usually false.

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Because of the variability, the horizontal scale has meaningless precision. The next chart cures this by grouping the states into three categories: low, medium and high level of measures.

This set of charts extends the time window back to March 1. For the designer, this creates a tricky problem - because states adapt their policies over time. As indicated in the subtitle, the grouping is based on the average severity index since March, rather than just November, as in the scatter plots above.

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The interplay between policy and health indicators is captured by connected scatter plots, of which the Times article included a few examples. Here is what happened in New York:

Up until April, the policies were catching up with the cases. The policies tightened even after the case-per-capita started falling. Then, policies eased a little, and cases started to spike again.

The Note tells us that the containment severity index is time shifted to reflect a two-week lag in effect. So, the case count on May 1 is not paired with the containment severity index of May 1 but of April 15.

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You can find the full article here.

 

 

 

Locating the political center

I mentioned the September special edition of Bloomberg Businessweek on the election in this prior post. Today, I'm featuring another data visualization from the magazine.

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Here are the rightmost two charts.

Time runs from top to bottom, spanning four decades.

Each chart covers a political issue. These two charts concern abortion and marijuana.

The marijuana question (far right) has only two answers, legalize or don't legalize. The underlying data measure the proportions of people agreeing to each point of view. Roughly three-quarters of the population disagreed with legalization in 1980 while two-thirds agree with it in 2020.

Notice that there are no horizontal axis labels. This is a great editorial decision. Only coarse trends are of interest here. It's not hard to figure out the relative proportions. Adding labels would just clutter up the display.

By contrast, the abortion question has three answer choices. The middle option is "Sometimes," which is represented by a white color, with a dot pattern. This is an issue on which public opinion in aggregate has barely shifted over time.

The charts are organized in a small-multiples format. It's likely that readers are consuming each chart individually.

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What about the dashed line that splits each chart in half? Why is it there?

The vertical line assists our perception of the proportions. Think of it as a single gridline.

In fact, this line is underplayed. The headline of the article is "tracking the political center." Where is the center?

Until now, we've paid attention to the boundaries between the differently colored areas. But those boundaries do not locate the political center!

The vertical dashed line is the political center; it represents the view of the median American. In 1980, the line sat inside the gray section, meaning the median American opposed legalizing marijuana. But the prevalent view was losing support over time and by 2010, there wer more Americans wanting to legalize marijuana than not. This is when the vertical line crossed into the green zone.

The following charts draw attention to the middle line, instead of the color boundaries:

On these charts, as you glance down the middle line, you can see that for abortion, the political center has never exited the middle category while for marijuana, the median American didn't want to legalize it until an inflection point was reached around 2010.

I highlight these inflection points with yellow dots.

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The effect on readers is entirely changed. The original charts draw attention to the areas first while the new charts pull your eyes to the vertical line.

 

Election visual 3: a strange, mash-up visualization

Continuing our review of FiveThirtyEight's election forecasting model visualization (link), I now look at their headline data visualization. (The previous posts in this series are here, and here.)

It's a set of 22 maps, each showing one election scenario, with one candidate winning. What chart form is this?

Small multiples may come to mind. A small-multiples chart is a grid in which every component graphic has the same form - same chart type, same color scheme, same scale, etc. The only variation from graphic to graphic is the data. The data are typically varied along a dimension of interest, for example, age groups, geographic regions, years. The following small-multiples chart, which I praised in the past (link), shows liquor consumption across the world.

Each component graphic changes according to the data specific to a country. When we scan across the grid, we draw conclusions about country-to-country variations. As with convention, there are as many graphics as there are countries in the dataset. Sometimes, the designer includes only countries that are directly relevant to the chart's topic.

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What is the variable FiveThirtyEight chose to vary from map to map? It's the scenario used in the election forecasting model.

This choice is unconventional. The 22 scenarios is a subset of the 40,000 scenarios from the simulation - we are left wondering how those 22 are chosen.

Returning to our question: what chart form is this?

Perhaps you're reminded of the dot plot from the previous post. On that dot plot, the designer summarized the results of 40,000 scenarios using 100 dots. Since Biden is the winner in 75 percent of all scenarios, the dot plot shows 75 blue dots (and 25 red).

The map is the new dot. The 75 blue dots become 16 blue maps (rounded down) while the 25 red dots become 6 red maps.

Is it a pictogram of maps? If we ignore the details on the maps, and focus on the counts of colors, then yes. It's just a bit challenging because of the hole in the middle, and the atypical number of maps.

As with the dot plot, the map details are a nice touch. It connects readers with the simulation model which can feel very abstract.

Oddly, if you're someone familiar with probabilities, this presentation is quite confusing.

With 40,000 scenarios reduced to 22 maps, each map should represent 1818 scenarios. On the dot plot, each dot should represent 400 scenarios. This follows the rule for creating pictograms. Each object in a pictogram - dot, map, figurine, etc. - should encode an equal amount of the data. For the 538 visualization, is it true that each of the six red maps represents 1818 scenarios? This may be the case but not likely.

Recall the dot plot where the most extreme red dot shows a scenario in which Trump wins 376 out of 538 electoral votes (margin = 214). Each dot should represent 400 scenarios. The visualization implies that there are 400 scenarios similar to the one on display. For the grid of maps, the following red map from the top left corner should, in theory, represent 1,818 similar scenarios. Could be, but I'm not sure.

Mathematically, each of the depicted scenario, including the blowout win above, occurs with 1/40,000 chance in the simulation. However, one expects few scenarios that look like the extreme scenario, and ample scenarios that look like the median scenario.  

So, the right way to read the 538 chart is to ignore the map details when reading the embedded pictogram, and then look at the small multiples of detailed maps bearing in mind that extreme scenarios are unique while median scenarios have many lookalikes.

(Come to think about it, the analogous situation in the liquor consumption chart is the relative population size of different countries. When comparing country to country, we tend to forget that the data apply to large numbers of people in populous countries, and small numbers in tiny countries.)

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There's a small improvement that can be made to the detailed maps. As I compare one map to the next, I'm trying to pick out which states that have changed to change the vote margin. Conceptually, the number of states painted red should decrease as the winning margin decreases, and the states that shift colors should be the toss-up states.

So I'd draw the solid Republican (Democratic) states with a lighter shade, forming an easily identifiable bloc on all maps, while the toss-up states are shown with a heavier shade.

Here, I just added a darker shade to the states that disappear from the first red map to the second.