Uncertainty is one of the most neglected aspects of number-based communication and one of the most important concepts in general numeracy. Comprehending uncertainty is hard. Visualizing it is, apparently, even harder.
Last week I read a paper called Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes, by M.Correll, D. Moritz, and J. Heer from the Data visualization and interactive analysis research at the University of Washington. This paper describes an interesting approach to color-encoding uncertainty.
Uncertainty visualization is commonly done by reducing color saturation and opacity. Cornell et al suggest combining saturation reduction with limiting the number of possible colors in a color palette. Unfortunately, there the authors used Javascript and not python for this paper, which means that in the future, I might try implementing it in python.
Visualizing uncertainty is one of the most challenging tasks in data visualization. Uncertain
via Value-Suppressing Uncertainty Palettes – UW Interactive Data Lab – Medium
Boris Gorelik 