Tag: pie chart

What do we see when we look at slices of a pie chart?

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 charts at all.

Robert Kosara is a Senior Research Scientist at Tableau Software (you should follow his blog https://eagereyes.org), who is very active in studying pie charts. In 2016, Robert Kosara and his collaborators published a series of studies about pie charts. There is a nice post called “An Illustrated Tour of the Pie Chart Study Results” that summarizes these studies. 

Last week, Robert published another paper with a pretty confident title (“Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts”) and a very inconclusive conclusion

While this study suggests that the charts are read by area, itis not conclusive. In particular, the possibility of pie chart usersre-projecting the chart to read them cannot be ruled out. Furtherexperiments are therefore needed to zero in on the exact mechanismby which this common chart type is read.

Kosara. “Evidence for Area as the Primary Visual Cue in Pie Charts.” OSF, 17 Oct. 2019. Web.

The previous Kosara’s studies had strong practical implications, the most important being that pie charts are not evil provided they are done correctly. However, I’m not sure what I can take from this one. As far as I understand the data, the answer to the questions in the beginning of this post are still unclear. Maybe, the “real answer” to these questions is “a combination of thereof”.

Good information + bad visualization = BAD

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 data visualization. I was wrong. The chart was there to convey some information. The problem is that it is bad in so many ways. It is very hard to appreciate the information in a post that shows charts like that. Especially when the post talks about data science that relies so much on data visualization.

via Math required for machine learning — Youth Innovation

I would write a post about good practices in pie charts, but Robert Kosara, of https://eagereyes.org does this so well, I don’t really think I need to reinvent the weel. Pie charts are very powerful in conveying information. Make sure you use this tool well. I strongly suggest reading everything Robert Kosara has to say on this topic.