Tag: Data Visualization

After my previous post about Anthropic’s spider chart, several people asked me how I would actually go about fixing it. So here is how – with a single prompt. I...

Anthropic has published an interesting study about labor market impacts of AI: Labor market impacts of AI: A new measure and early evidence. It is hard to overestimate Anthropic’s contribution...

I recently came across a financial update with a plot that looks like the one below: a bar plot of revenue with a line plot of growth rate. The growth...

An example of a very bad graph Nature Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal that belongs to the very prestigious Nature group. Today, I was reading a paper that included THIS...

How do you properly select a colormap for a graph? What makes the rainbow color map a wrong choice, and what are the proper alternatives? Today, I stumbled upon a...

I stumbled upon a great graph that tells a complex story compellingly. Comparison of two COVID-19 waves in the UK, taken from here. This graph compares the last two waves...

The great Robert Kosara, also known as the “eager eyes” has started publishing a series of videos he calls Chart Appreciation. In these videos, Robert takes a piece of data...

I started following data visualization news and opinions quite a few years ago. One of the first bloggers who were active in this area NeurDojo, by the (now) professor Zen...

I recently rediscovered a volcano plot – a scatter plot that aims to visualize changes in large populations. Volcano plots are very technical and specialized and, most probably, are not...

A fellow data analyst asked a question? What do we do when we need to draw a stacked bar chart that has too many colors? How do we select the...

Slope charts are often suggested as a valid alternative to clustered bar charts, especially for “before and after” cases. So, instead of a clustered bar char like this we tend...

A radar chart (sometimes called “spider charts”) look cool but are, in fact, pretty lame. So much so that when the data visualization author Stephen Few mentioned them in his...

I had the honor to record an introductory data visualization course for high school students as a part of the Israeli national distance learning project. The course is in Hebrew,...

I’ve stumbled upon an exciting project – text visualization browser. It’s a web page that allows one to search for different text visualization techniques using keywords and publication time. Text...

הקליקו כאן לקבלת פרטים והרשמה!

I apologize for my harsh language, but recently I was exposed to a bunch of graphs on the “information is beautiful” site, and I was offended (well, ot really, but...

A population pyramid also called an “age-gender-pyramid”, is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population (typically that of a country or region of...

From time to time, we need to look at a distribution of a group of values. Histograms are, I think, the most popular way to visualize distributions. “Back in the...

There was a consensus among the data visualization purists that the rainbow color map, and it’s close cousin Jet are bad. Really bad. These colormaps used to be popular at...

In technical communication, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. There are multiple ways to ensure this principle. Some of these ways require careful chart...

I will be talking about data visualization at the next NDR conference on July 28. All the conferences organized by the NDR team are well organized and of a very...

Being a data visualization consultant, I can’t help looking for dataviz problems in graphs that I see. Even if the graph is good. Even if I know that I would...

Look at this wonderful piece of data visualization (taken from here). If you know the terms “tertiary structure” and “glycan”, there is NO way you miss the message that the...

It’s fun to look at the visit statistics and to discover old stories. I wrote this post in 2016. For a reason I don’t know, this post has been one...

Network visualization can mesmerize and hypnotize. Chord diagrams are especially cool because they are so colorful and smooth. The problem is that sometimes, the result doesn’t provide any actual value,...

Being a data scientist and a self-proclaimed data visualization expert, I like using log scale graphs when I find them appropriate. However, as a speaker and a communicator, I refrain...

Besides being a freelancer data scientist and visualization expert, I teach. One of the toughest concepts to teach and to visualize is odds ratio. Today, I stumbled upon a very...

Would you buy a grammar book with a clear spelling mistake on its cover? I hope not. That’s what happened to IBM when it published it’s new data visualization guide....

I have to admit, I was skeptical at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. I started becoming skeptical now when it seems that the crisis didn’t hit my country too...

I’m sorting my teaching material, and I found this gem. The UK Government Statistical Service published a guideline for effective data visualization and tables. If you know a busy person...

I wrote about data giraffes two weeks ago. Usually, “data giraffes” are a problem and we need to work hard in order to solve it. Sometimes, they are a useful...

A data giraffe is a situation where a very prominent data point shades everything else. I learned this term from a post by Pini Yakuel and immediately liked it a...

Graph code: here.

People ask me for good intro video to data visualization. I tend to ask them to look for one of my lectures. To save the search, here’s one of the...

From time to time, we need to look at the distribution of a group of values. Histograms are, I think, the most popular way to visualize distributions. “Back in the...

In June 2019, I attended the NDR AI conference in Iași, Romania where I also gave a talk. Recently, the organizers uploaded the video recording to YouTube.

What do we see when we look at slices of a pie chart? Angles? Areas? Arc length? The answer to this question isn’t clear and thus “experts” recommend avoiding pie...

On Sunday, I wrote about bootstrapping. On Monday, I wrote about visualization uncertainty. Let’s now talk about bootstrapping and uncertainty visualization. Robert Grant is a data visualization expert who wrote...

This is another post in the series Because You Can. This time, I will claim that the fact that you can put error bars on a bar chart doesn’t mean...

Dr. Richard Brath is a data visualization expert who also blogs from time to time. Each post in Richard’s blog provides a deep, and often unexpected to me, insight into...

Pseudocode is an informal high-level description of the operating principle of a computer program or other algorithm. People write pseudocode to isolate the “bigger picture” of an algorithm. Pseudocode doesn’t...

I have published the slide deck from my talk at the NDR conference in Iași, Romania. Enjoy. [slideshare id=149244993&doc=20190604abcofdatavisualizationiasi-190611185232]

אני מחפש דוגמאות נוספות יש לכם דוגמה של גרף עברי ״הפוך״? גרפים בערבית או פארסי? שלחו לי. This post is a Hebrew translation of the post “X-axis direction in Right-To-Left...

I need more examples Do you have more examples of graphs written in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu or another RTL language? Please send them to me. Textbook examples I already wrote...

The maximum data-ink ratio principle implies that one should not use colors in their graphs if the graph is understandable without the colors. The fact that you can do something,...

Why adding text labels to graph lines, when you can build graph lines using text labels? On microtext lines

This post is written in Hebrew about a Hebrew issue. I won’t translate it to English. אני מלמד data visualization בשתי מכללות בישראל — במכללת עזריאלי להנדסה בירושלים ובמכון הטכנולוגי...

If you speak Arabic or Farsi, I need your help. If you don’t speak, share this post with someone who does. Right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi...

See my recap of the recent EuroSciPy, published on https://data.blog In which Boris Gorelik shares his favorite talks and workshops from EuroSciPy 2018. via Conference Recap: EuroSciPy 2018 — Data...

If you ever gave or attended a presentation, you are familiar with this situation: the presenter asks whether there are any questions and … nobody asks anything. This is an...

My colleague, Chares Earl, pointed me to this interesting 2010 post that explores different ways to visualize categories of drastically different sizes. The post author, Tom Hopper, experiments with different...

Today, during the EuroSciPy conference, I gave a presentation titled “Three most common mistakes in data visualization and how to avoid them”. The title of this presentation is identical to...

Yesterday, I gave a data visualization workshop at EuroSciPy 2018 in Trento. I spent HOURs building and improving it. I even developed a “simple to use, easy to follow, never...

I am excited to run a data visualization tutorial, and to give a data visualization talk during the 2018 EuroSciPy meeting in Trento, Italy. My tutorial “Data visualization – from...

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...

From time to time, people ask me for help with non-trivial data visualization tasks. A couple of weeks ago, a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend showed me a set of graphs with the following...

From time to time, I give a lecture about most common mistakes in data visualization. In this lection, I say that not adding a graph’s conclusion as a title is...

That fact that you can doesn’t mean that you should! I will say it once again.That fact that you can doesn’t mean that you should! Look at this slopegraph that...

“There is only one thing worse than a pie chart. It’s a 3-D pie chart”. This is what I used to think for quite a long time. Recently, I have...

Today, I hosted a data visualization workshop, as a part of the workshop day adjacent to the fourth Israeli Data Science Summit. I really enjoyed this workshop, especially the follow-up...

TL/DR What: Data Visualization from default to outstanding. Test cases of tough data visualization **Why: ** You would never settle for default settings of a machine learning algorithm. Instead, you...

Yesterday, I talked in front of the Barcelona Data Science and Machine Learning Meetup about the most common mistakes in data visualization. I enjoyed talking with the local community very...

On Thursday, March 20, I will give a talk titled “Three most common mistakes in data visualization and how to avoid them.” I will be a guest of the Barcelona...

From time to time, we need to look at a distribution of a group of values. Histograms are, I think, the most popular way to visualize distributions. “Back in the...

Exposé, an Australian-based data analytics company, published a use case in which they analyze the benefits of a custom-made machine learning solution. The only piece of data in their report...

What do you do when you have spare time? I tend to throw graphs from ads to a graph digitizer to compute the “lie factor”. Take the following graph for...

Data-ink ratio is considered to be THE guiding principle in data visualization. Coined by Edward Tufte, data-ink is “the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response...

In the data visualization world, not starting a bar chart at zero is a “BIG NO”. Some people protest. “How come can anyone tell me how to start my bar...

Several people have asked me about the technology I used to create the graphs in my recent post about the gender salary gap in the Israeli high-tech. Like 99% of...

If you had a chance to talk to me about data visualization, you know that I dislike the use of double Y-axis for anything except for presenting different units of...

A large and popular Israeli Facebook group, “The High-Tech Troubles,” has recently surveyed its participants. The responders provided personal, demographic, and professional information. The group owners have published the aggregated...

Recently, I stumbled upon a report called “Understanding Today’s Chief Data Scientist” published by an HR company called Heidrick & Struggles. This document tries to draw a profile of the...

Sigrid Keydana, in her post Plus/minus what? Let’s talk about uncertainty (talk) — recurrent null, said What’s the most important thing about communicating uncertainty? You’re doing it Really? Here, for...

Line charts are great to convey the evolution of a variable over the time. This is a typical chart. It has three key components, the X-axis that represents the time,...

This is my “because you can” rant. Here, you can see a typical situation. You have some sales data that you want to represent using a bar plot. Immediately, you...

I went through my Machine Learning tag feed. Suddenly, I stumbled upon a pie chart that looked so terrible, I was sure the post would be about bad practices in...

Seaborn is a Python visualization library based on matplotlib. It provides a high-level interface for drawing attractive statistical graphics. Look at this example from the seaborn documentation site >>> import...

From time to time, you might hear that graphical method A is better at representing problem X than method B. While in case of problem Z, the method B is...

Here’s an old joke: Q: Why do dogs lick their balls? A: Because they can. Canine behavior aside, the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you should...

I teach data visualization to in Azrieli College of Engineering in Jerusalem. Yesterday, during my first lesson, I was talking about the different ways a chart design selection can lead...

Stephen Few is the author of (among others) “Show Me The Numbers”. Besides writing about what should **be done, in the field of data visualization, Dr. Few also writes a...

When I teach data visualization, I love showing my students how simple changes in the way one visualizes his or her data may drive the potential audience to different conclusions....

Sometimes, when I see a graph, I think “I could draw a better version.” From time to time, I even consider writing a blog post with the “before” and “after”...

There’s an interesting mini-drama going on in the data visualization world. The moderators of DataIsBeautiful invited Stephen Few for an ask-me-anything (AMA) session. Stephen Few is a data visualization researcher...

Almost half a year ago, I decided to create an online data visualization course. After investing hundreds of hours, I managed to release the first lecture and record another one....

The first lesson of the course Data Visualization Beyond the Tutorial is online! Go to the lesson page to watch the lesson video. There’s also an assignment! Do you know...

The first lecture of the data visualization course will be published on July 7 (7/7/17). There was a typo in the original announcement.

If you create charts using your tool’s default settings and your intuition, chances are you’re doing it wrong. Let me present you an online course that dives into the theory...

Adding legends to a graph is easy. With matplotlib, for example, you simply call plt.legend() and voilà, you have your legends. The fact that any major or minor visualization platform...

My latest post on data.blog

We are surrounded by discrete events: posts and comments, purchases from the online store, page visits are all examples of discrete events. Some of these events happen periodically; others happen...