Same data + same chart form = same story. Maybe.

We love charts that tell stories.

Some people believe that if they situate the data in the right chart form, the stories reveal themselves.

Some people believe for a given dataset, there exists a best chart form that brings out the story.

An implication of these beliefs is that the story is immutable, given the dataset and the chart form.

If you use the Trifecta Checkup, you already know I don't subscribe to those ideas. That's why the Trifecta has three legs, the third is the question - which is related to the message or the story.

***

I came across the following chart by Statista, illustrating the growth in Covid-19 cases from the start of the pandemic to this month. The underlying data are collected by WHO and cover the entire globe. The data are grouped by regions.

The story of this chart appears to be that the world moves in lock step, with each region behaving more or less the same.

If you visit the WHO site, they show a similar chart:

On this chart, the regions at the bottom of the graph (esp. Southeast Asia in purple) clearly do not follow the same time patterns as Americas (orange) or Europe (green).

What we're witnessing is: same data, same chart form, different stories.

This is a feature, not a bug, of the stacked area chart. The story is driven largely by the order in which the pieces are stacked. In the Statista chart, the largest pieces are placed at the bottom while for WHO, the order is exactly reversed.

(There are minor differences which do not affect my argument. The WHO chart omits the "Other" category which accounts for very little. Also, the Statista chart shows the smoothed data using 7-day averaging.)

In this example, the order chosen by WHO preserves the story while the order chosen by Statista wipes it out.

***

What might be the underlying question of someone who makes this graph? Perhaps it is to identify the relative prevalence of Covid-19 in different regions at different stages of the pandemic.

Emphasis on the word "relative". Instead of plotting absolute number of cases, I consider plotting relative number of cases, that is to say, the proportion of cases in each region at given times.

This leads to a stacked area percentage chart.

In this side-by-side view, you see that this form is not affected by flipping the order of the regions. Both charts say the same thing: that there were two waves in Europe and the Americas that dwarfed all other regions.

 

 

Making graphics last over time

Yesterday, I analyzed the data visualization by the White House showing the progress of U.S. Covid-19 vaccinations. Here is the chart.

John who tweeted this at me, saying "please get a better data viz".

I'm happy to work with them or the CDC on better dataviz. Here's an example of what I do.

Obviously, I'm using made-up data here and this is a sketch. I want to design a chart that can be updated continuously, as data accumulate. That's one of the shortcomings of that bubble format they used.

In earlier months, the chart can be clipped to just the lower left corner.

Illustrating differential growth rates

Reader Mirko was concerned about a video published in Germany that shows why the new coronavirus variant is dangerous. He helpfully provided a summary of the transcript:

The South African and the British mutations of the SARS-COV-2 virus are spreading faster than the original virus. On average, one infected person infects more people than before. Researchers believe the new variant is 50 to 70 % more transmissible.

Here are two key moments in the video:

This seems to be saying the original virus (left side) replicates 3 times inside the infected person while the new variant (right side) replicates 19 times. So we have a roughly 6-fold jump in viral replication.

Later in the video, it appears that every replicate of the old virus finds a new victim while the 19 replicates of the new variant land on 13 new people, meaning 6 replicates didn't find a host.

As Mirko pointed out, the visual appears to have run away from the data. (In our Trifecta Checkup, we have a problem with the arrow between the D and the V corners. What the visual is saying is not aligned with what the data are saying.)

***

It turns out that the scientists have been very confusing when talking about the infectiousness of this new variant. The most quoted line is that the British variant is "50 to 70 percent more transmissible". At first, I thought this is a comment on the famous "R number". Since the R number around December was roughly 1 in the U.K, the new variant might bring the R number up to 1.7.

However, that is not the case. From this article, it appears that being 5o to 70 percent more transmissible means R goes up from 1 to 1.4. R is interpreted as the average number of people infected by one infected person.

Mirko wonders if there is a better way to illustrate this. I'm sure there are many better ways. Here's one I whipped up:

The left side is for the 40% higher R number. Both sides start at the center with 10 infected people. At each time step, if R=1 (right side), each of the 10 people infects 10 others, so the total infections increase by 10 per time step. It's immediately obvious that a 40% higher R is very serious indeed. Starting with 10 infected people, in 10 steps, the total number of infections is almost 1,000, almost 10 times higher than when R is 1.

The lines of the graphs simulate the transmission chains. These are "average" transmission chains since R is an average number.

 

P.S. [1/29/2021: Added the missing link to the article in which it is reported that 50-70 percent more transmissible implies R increasing by 40%.]

 

 

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.

***

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.

***

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.

 

 

A beautiful curve and its deadly misinterpretation

When the preliminary analyses of their Phase 3 trials came out , vaccine developers pleased their audience of scientists with the following data graphic:

The above was lifted out of the FDA briefing document for the Pfizer / Biontech vaccine.

Some commentators have honed in on the blue line for the vaccinated arm of the Pfizer trial.

Since the vertical axis shows cumulative number of cases, it is noted that the vaccine reached peak efficacy after 14 days following the first dose. The second dose was administered around Day 21. At this point, the vaccine curve appeared almost flat. Thus, these commentators argued, we should make a big bet on the first dose.

***

The chart is indeed very beautiful. It's rare to see such a huge gap between the test group and the control group. Notice that I just described the gap between test and control. That's what a statistician is looking at in that chart - not the blue line, but the gap between the red and blue lines.

Imagine: if the curve for the placebo group looked the same as that for the vaccinated group, then the chart would lose all its luster. Screams of victory would be replaced by tears of sadness.

Here I bring back both lines, and you should focus on the gaps between the lines:

Does the action stop around day 14? The answer is a resounding No! In fact, the red line keeps rising so over time, the vaccine's efficacy improves (since VE is a ratio between the two groups).

The following shows the vaccine efficacy curve:

Right before the second dose, VE is just below 50%. VE keeps rising and reaches 70% by day 50, which is about a month after the second dose.

If the FDA briefing document has shown the VE curve, instead of the cumulative-cases curve, few would argue that you don't need the second dose!

***

What went wrong here? How come the beautiful chart may turn out to be lethal? (See this post on my book blog for reasons why I think foregoing or delaying the second dose will exacerbate the pandemic.)

It's a bit of bait and switch. The original chart plots cumulative case counts, separately for each treatment group. Cumulative case counts are inputs to computing vaccine efficacy. It is true that as the blue line for the vaccine flattens, VE would likely rise. But the case count for the vaccine group is an imperfect proxy for VE. As I showed above, the VE continues to gain strength long after the vaccine case count has levelled.

The important lesson for data visualization designers is: plot the metric that matters to decision-makers; avoid imperfect proxies.

 

P.S. [1/19/2021: For those who wants to get behind the math of all this, the following several posts on my book blog will help.

One-dose Pfizer is not happening, and here's why

The case for one-dose vaccines is lacking key details

One-dose vaccine strategy elevates PR over science

]

[1/21/2021: The Guardian chimes in with "Single Covid vaccine dose in Israel 'less effective than we thought'" (link). "In remarks reported by Army Radio, Nachman Ash said a single dose appeared “less effective than we had thought”, and also lower than Pfizer had suggested." To their credit, Pfizer has never publicly recommended a one-dose treatment.]

[1/21/2021: For people in marketing or business, I wrote up a new post that expresses the one-dose vs two-dose problem in terms of optimizing an email drip campaign. It boils down to: do you accept that argument that you should get rid of your latter touches because the first email did all the work? Or do you want to run an experiment with just one email before you decide? You can read this on the book blog here.]

Handling partial data on graphics

Last week, I posted on the book blog a piece about excess deaths and accelerated deaths (link). That whole piece is about how certain types of analysis have to be executed at certain moments of time.  The same analysis done at the wrong time yields the wrong conclusions.

Here is a good example of what I'm talking about. This is a graph of U.S. monthly deaths from Covid-19 during the entire pandemic. The chart is from the COVID Tracking Project, although I pulled it down from my Twitter feed.

There is nothing majorly wrong with this column chart (I'd remove the axis labels). But there is a big problem. Are we seeing a boomerang of deaths from November to December to January?

Not really. This trend is there only because the chart is generated on January 12. The last column contains 12 days while the prior two columns contain 30-31 days.

The Trifecta Checkup picks up this problem. What the visual is showing isn't what the data are saying. I'd call this a Type D chart.

***

What to fix this?

One solution is to present partial data for all the other columns, so that the readers can compare the January column to the others.

One critique of this is the potential seasonality. The first 38% (12 out of 31) of a month may not be comparable across months. A further seasonal adjustment makes this better - if we decide the benefits outweight the complexity.

Another solution is to project the full-month tally.

The critique here is the accuracy of the projection.

But the point is that not making the adjustment would be worse.

 

 

These are the top posts of 2020

It's always very interesting as a writer to look back at a year's of posts and find out which ones were most popular with my readers.

Here are the top posts on Junk Charts from 2020:

How to read this chart about coronavirus risk

This post about a New York Times scatter plot dates from February, a time when many Americans were debating whether Covid-19 was just the flu.

Proportions and rates: we are no dupes

This post about a ArsTechnica chart on the effects of Covid-19 by age is an example of designing the visual to reflect the structure of the data.

When the pie chart is more complex than the data

This post shows a 3D pie chart which is worse than a 2D pie chart.

Twitter people upset with that Covid symptoms diagram

This post discusses some complicated graphics designed to illustrate complicated datasets on Covid-19 symptoms.

Cornell must remove the logs before it reopens in the fall

This post is another warning to think twice before you use log scales.

What is the price of objectivity?

This post turns an "objective" data visualization into a piece of visual story-telling.

The snake pit chart is the best election graphic ever

This post introduces my favorite U.S. presidential election graphic, designed by the FiveThirtyEight team.

***

Here is a list of posts that deserve more attention:

Locating the political center

An example of bringing readers as close to the insights as possible

Visualizing change over time

An example of designing data visualization to reflect the structure of multivariate data

Bloomberg made me digest these graphics slowly

An example of simple and thoughtful graphics

The hidden bad assumption behind most dual-axis time-series charts

Read this before you make a dual-axis chart

Pie chart conventions

Read this before you make a pie chart

***
Looking forward to bring you more content in 2021!

Happy new year.

Atypical time order and bubble labeling

This chart appeared in a Charles Schwab magazine in Summer, 2019.

This bubble chart does not print any data labels. The bubbles take our attention but the designer realizes that the actual values of the volatility are not intuitive numbers. The same is true of any standard deviation numbers. If you're told SD of a data series is 3, it doesn't tell you much by itself.

I first transformed this chart into the equivalent column chart:

Two problems surface on the axes.

For the time axis, the years are jumbled. Readers experience vertigo, as we try to figure out how to read the chart. Our expectation that time moves left to right is thwarted. This ordering also requires every single year label to be present.

For the vertical axis, I could have left out the numbers completely. They are not really meaningful. These represent the areas of the bubbles but only relative to how I measured them.

***

In the next version, I sorted time in the conventional manner. Following Tufte's classic advice, only the tops of the columns are plotted.

What you see is that this ordering is much easier to comprehend. Figuring out that 2018 is an average year in terms of volatility is not any harder than in the original. In fact, we can reproduce the order of the previous chart just by letting our eyes sweep top to bottom.

To make it even easier to read the vertical axis, I converted the numbers into an index, with the average volatility as 100 %  (assigned to 0% on the chart) .

Now, you can see that 2018 is roughly at the average while 2008 is 400% above the average level. (How should we interpret this statement? That's a question I pose to my statistics students. It's not intuitive how one should interpret the statement that the standard deviation is 5 times higher.)

 

 

Is this an example of good or bad dataviz?

This chart is giving me feelings:

I first saw it on TV and then a reader submitted it.

Let's apply a Trifecta Checkup to the chart.

Starting at the Q corner, I can say the question it's addressing is clear and relevant. It's the relationship between Trump and McConnell's re-election. The designer's intended message comes through strongly - the chart offers evidence that McConnell owes his re-election to Trump.

Visually, the graphic has elements of great story-telling. It presents a simple (others might say, simplistic) view of the data - just the poll results of McConnell vs McGrath at various times, and the election result. It then flags key events, drawing the reader's attention to those. These events are selected based on key points on the timeline.

The chart includes wise design choices, such as no gridlines, infusing the legend into the chart title, no decimals (except for last pair of numbers, the intention of which I'm not getting), and leading with the key message.

I can nitpick a few things. Get rid of the vertical axis. Also, expand the scale so that the difference between 51%-40% and 58%-38% becomes more apparent. Space the time points in proportion to the dates. The box at the bottom is a confusing afterthought that reduces rather than assists the messaging.

But the designer got the key things right. The above suggestions do not alter the reader's expereince that much. It's a nice piece of visual story-telling, and from what I can see, has made a strong impact with the audience it is intended to influence.

This chart is proof why the Trifecta Checkup has three corners, plus linkages between them. If we just evaluate what the visual is conveying, this chart is clearly above average.

***

In the D corner, we ask: what the Data are saying?

This is where the chart runs into several problems. Let's focus on the last two sets of numbers: 51%-40% and 58%-38%. Just add those numbers and do you notice something?

The last poll sums to 91%. This means that up to 10% of the likely voters responded "not sure" or some other candidate. If these "shy" voters show up at the polls as predicted by the pollsters, and if they voted just like the not shy voters, then the election result would have been 56%-44%, not 51%-40%. So, the 58%-38% result is within the margin of error of these polls. (If the "shy" voters break for McConnell in a 75%-25% split, then he gets 58% of the total votes.)

So, the data behind the line chart aren't suggesting that the election outcome is anomalous. This presents a problem with the Q-D and D-V green arrows as these pairs are not in sync.

***

In the D corner, we should consider the totality of the data available to the designer, not just what the designer chooses to utilize. The pivot of the chart is the flag annotating the "Trump robocall."

Here are some questions I'd ask the designer:

What else happened on October 31 in Kentucky?

What else happened on October 31, elsewhere in the country?

Was Trump featured in any other robocalls during the period portrayed?

How many robocalls were made by the campaign, and what other celebrities were featured?

Did any other campaign event or effort happen between the Trump robocall and election day?

Is there evidence that nothing else that happened after the robocall produced any value?

The chart commits the XYopia (i.e. X-Y myopia) fallacy of causal analysis. When the data analyst presents one cause and one effect, we are cued to think the cause explains the effect but in every scenario that is not a designed experiment, there are multiple causes at play. Sometimes, the more influential cause isn't the one shown in the chart.

***

Finally, let's draw out the connection between the last set of poll numbers and the election results. This shows why causal inference in observational data is such a beast.

Poll numbers are about a small number of people (500-1,000 in the case of Kentucky polls) who respond to polling. Election results are based on voters (> 2 million). An assumption made by the designer is that these polls are properly conducted, and their results are credible.

The chart above makes the claim that Trump's robocall gave McConnell 7% more votes than expected. This implies the robocall influenced at least 140,000 voters. Each such voter must fit the following criteria:

• Was targeted by the Trump robocall
• Was reached by the Trump robocall (phone was on, etc.)
• Responded to the Trump robocall, by either picking up the phone or listening to the voice recording or dialing a call-back number
• Did not previously intend to vote for McConnell
• If reached by a pollster, would refuse to respond, or say not sure, or voting for McGrath or a third candidate
• Had no other reason to change his/her behavior

Just take the first bullet for example. If we found a voter who switched to McConnell after October 31, and if this person was not on the robocall list, then this voter contributes to the unexpected gain in McConnell votes but weakens the case that the robocall influenced the election.

As analysts, our job is to find data to investigate all of the above. Some of these are easier to investigate. The campaign knows, for example, how many people were on the target list, and how many listened to the voice recording.

 

 

 

 

I made a streamgraph

The folks at FiveThirtyEight were excited about the following dataviz they published last week two weeks ago, illustrating the progression of vote-counting by state. (link) That was indeed the unique and confusing feature of the 2020 Presidential election in the States. For those outside the U.S., what happened (by and large) was that many Americans, skewing Biden supporters, voted by mail before Election Day but their votes were sometimes counted after the same-day votes were tallied.

 

A number of us kept staring at these charts, hoping for a how-to-read-it explanation. Here is a zoom-in for the state of Michigan:

To save you the trouble, here is how.

The key is to fight your urge to look at the brown area. I know, it's pretty hard to ignore the biggest areas of every chart. But try to make them disappear.

Focus on the top edge of the chart. This line gives the total number of votes counted so far. In Michigan, by hour 12, about 2.4 million votes were counted, and by hour 72, 2.8 million votes were on the book. This line gives the sum of the two major parties' vote totals [since third parties got negligible votes in this election, I'm ignoring them so as to simplify the discussion].

Next, look at the red and blue areas. These represent the gap in the number of votes between the two parties' current vote totals. If the area is red, Trump was leading; if blue, Biden was leading. Each color flip represents a lead change. Suppress the urge to interpret red as the number or share of Trump votes.

***

What have we learned about the vote counting in Michigan?

Counting significantly slowed after the 12th hour. Trump raced to a lead on Election Day, and around hour 20, the race was dead even, and after that, Biden overtook Trump and never looked back. Throughout most of this period, the vote lead was small compared to the total votes cast although at the end, the Biden lead was noticeable.

If you insist on interpreting the brown area, it is equal to twice the vote total of the second-place candidate, so it really isn't something you want to look at.

Just for contrast, here is the chart for Iowa:

Trump led from beginning to end, with his lead widening slightly as more votes were counted.

***

As I was stewing over this chart, a ominous thought overcame me. Would a streamgraph work for this data? You don't hear much about streamgraphs here because I rarely favor them (see this long-ago post) but let's just try one and see.

(These streamgraphs were made in R using the streamgraph package. Post-processing was applied to customize the labeling.)

This chart conveys all the key points listed before. You can see how the gap evolved over time, the lead flips, which candidate was in the lead, and the total mass of votes counted at different times. The gap is shown in the middle.

I can't say I'm completely happy with the streamgraph - I hope readers don't care about the numbers because it's hard to evaluate a difference when it's split two ways on either side of the middle axis!

***

If you come up with a better idea, make sure to leave a comment.