Types of Charts
Three principles for visualization
- be true to your research – design your display to illustrate a particular point
- maximize information, minimize ink –use the simplest possible representation for the bits you want to convey
- organize hierarchically – what should a viewer see first? what if they look deeper?
Worked example
- Participants heard examples from an artificial language
- Three different presentation methods for examples – index cards, list of sentences, mp3 files on ipod
- Task was to spread $100 of "bets" across different continuations for a new example
- Dependent measure was bet on the correct answer
bar graph
bar graph with standard errors
bar graph with 95% CIs
box plot
viola plot
strip chart
strip chart with means
strip chart with means
Morals of the example
- Summary statistics
- almost always necessary
- but at what level of analysis?
- Distribution is important
- what is the form of the data?
- is your summary misleading?
- Fancier is not always better
- pretty pictures are awesome
- but not if they obscure the data
Source: Mike Frank and Ed Vul, https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/res-9-0002-statistics-and-visualization-for-data-analysis-and-inference-january-iap-2009/96df7f49cd50ed9bb0feb4793b9c8d89_lec1_visulzatn.pdf
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.