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687 andrew gelman stats-2011-04-29-Zero is zero


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Introduction: Nathan Roseberry writes: I thought I had read on your blog that bar charts should always include zero on the scale, but a search of your blog (or google) didn’t return what I was looking for. Is it considered a best practice to always include zero on the axis for bar charts? Has this been written in a book? My reply: The idea is that the area of the bar represents “how many” or “how much.” The bar has to go down to 0 for that to work. You don’t have to have your y-axis go to zero, but if you want the axis to go anywhere else, don’t use a bar graph, use a line graph. Usually line graphs are better anyway. I’m sure this is all in a book somewhere.


Summary: the most important sentenses genereted by tfidf model

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1 Nathan Roseberry writes: I thought I had read on your blog that bar charts should always include zero on the scale, but a search of your blog (or google) didn’t return what I was looking for. [sent-1, score-2.068]

2 Is it considered a best practice to always include zero on the axis for bar charts? [sent-2, score-1.722]

3 My reply: The idea is that the area of the bar represents “how many” or “how much. [sent-4, score-0.947]

4 You don’t have to have your y-axis go to zero, but if you want the axis to go anywhere else, don’t use a bar graph, use a line graph. [sent-6, score-1.767]


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Introduction: Nathan Roseberry writes: I thought I had read on your blog that bar charts should always include zero on the scale, but a search of your blog (or google) didn’t return what I was looking for. Is it considered a best practice to always include zero on the axis for bar charts? Has this been written in a book? My reply: The idea is that the area of the bar represents “how many” or “how much.” The bar has to go down to 0 for that to work. You don’t have to have your y-axis go to zero, but if you want the axis to go anywhere else, don’t use a bar graph, use a line graph. Usually line graphs are better anyway. I’m sure this is all in a book somewhere.

2 0.31919581 1090 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-28-“. . . extending for dozens of pages”

Introduction: Kaiser writes : I have read a fair share of bore-them-to-tears compilation of survey research results – you know, those presentations with one multi-colored, stacked or grouped bar chart after another, extending for dozens of pages. I hate those grouped bar charts also—as I’ve written repeatedly, the central role of almost all statistical displays is to make comparisons, and you can make twice as many comparisons with a line plot as a bar plot. But I suspect the real problem with the reports that Kaiser is talking about is the “extending for dozens of pages” part. If they could just print each individual plot smaller and put dozens on a page, you could maybe get through the whole report in two or three pages. Almost always, graphs are too large. I’ve even seen abominations such as a fifty-page report with a single huge pie chart on each page. As Kaiser says, think about communication! A report with one big pie chart or bar plot per page is like a text document with one w

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Introduction: Jimmy passes this article by Ahmad Reza Hosseinpoor and Carla AbouZahr. I have little to say, except that (a) they seem to be making a reasonable point, and (b) those bar graphs are pretty ugly.

4 0.25129098 294 andrew gelman stats-2010-09-23-Thinking outside the (graphical) box: Instead of arguing about how best to fix a bar chart, graph it as a time series lineplot instead

Introduction: John Kastellec points me to this blog by Ezra Klein criticizing the following graph from a recent Republican Party report: Klein (following Alexander Hart ) slams the graph for not going all the way to zero on the y-axis, thus making the projected change seem bigger than it really is. I agree with Klein and Hart that, if you’re gonna do a bar chart, you want the bars to go down to 0. On the other hand, a projected change from 19% to 23% is actually pretty big, and I don’t see the point of using a graphical display that hides it. The solution: Ditch the bar graph entirely and replace it by a lineplot , in particular, a time series with year-by-year data. The time series would have several advantages: 1. Data are placed in context. You’d see every year, instead of discrete averages, and you’d get to see the changes in the context of year-to-year variation. 2. With the time series, you can use whatever y-axis works with the data. No need to go to zero. P.S. I l

5 0.18632703 1061 andrew gelman stats-2011-12-16-CrossValidated: A place to post your statistics questions

Introduction: Seth Rogers writes: I [Rogers] am a member of an online community of statisticians where I burn a great deal of time (and a recovering cog sci researcher). Our community website is a peer-reviewed Q and A spanning stats topics ranging from applications to mathematical theory. Our online community consists of mostly university faculty, grad students and technical consultants. The answer quality is very strong and the web design is intuitive. I think you and your readers are like-minded and would be really interested in some of the topics on the site, CrossValidated (you may know the sister site: stackoverflow.com ). The philosophy is purely to further knowledge for the sake of knowledge and take pride in learning. I took a quick look and the site seemed like it could be useful to people. The only thing I didn’t understand is, why doesn’t it have a search function? (Or maybe it was there somewhere and I couldn’t find it.) P.S. to all the commenters who wrote replies such

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Introduction: Nathan Roseberry writes: I thought I had read on your blog that bar charts should always include zero on the scale, but a search of your blog (or google) didn’t return what I was looking for. Is it considered a best practice to always include zero on the axis for bar charts? Has this been written in a book? My reply: The idea is that the area of the bar represents “how many” or “how much.” The bar has to go down to 0 for that to work. You don’t have to have your y-axis go to zero, but if you want the axis to go anywhere else, don’t use a bar graph, use a line graph. Usually line graphs are better anyway. I’m sure this is all in a book somewhere.

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Introduction: Howard Friedman sent me a new book, The Measure of a Nation, subtitled How to Regain America’s Competitive Edge and Boost Our Global Standing. Without commenting on the substance of Friedman’s recommendations, I’d like to endorse his strategy of presentation, which is to display graph after graph after graph showing the same message over and over again, which is that the U.S. is outperformed by various other countries (mostly in Europe) on a variety of measures. These aren’t graphs I would ever make—they are scatterplots in which the x-axis conveys no information. But they have the advantage of repetition: once you figure out how to read one of the graphs, you can read the others easily. Here’s an example which I found from a quick Google: I can’t actually figure out what is happening on the x-axis, nor do I understand the “star, middle child, dog” thing. But I like the use of graphics. Lots more fun than bullet points. Seriously. P.S. Just to be clear: I am not trying

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Introduction: Jimmy passes this article by Ahmad Reza Hosseinpoor and Carla AbouZahr. I have little to say, except that (a) they seem to be making a reasonable point, and (b) those bar graphs are pretty ugly.

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