Types of Charts
These lecture note slides walk through various charting options at your disposal. The slide collection also includes some working examples to show how one dataset can be visualized with many different charts. Take note of which charts are associated with each data type. Some are quite creative.
Conventional visualizations
Histogram, Pie Chart, Stacked bar graph & Venn diagram
Histogram
- Important first way of looking at your data
- One dimensional
- Shows shape by binning a continuous distribution
Grouped histogram
Pie chart
- A whole split into parts
- Emphasizes that all parts sum to a constant
- Single dimension with discrete categories
Stacked bar graph
- Wholes split into parts
- Easy to compare
- often better than pie chart
- Can have multiple discrete dimensions
Venn diagram
- Shows overlap between discrete groups
- Sometimes the only way to display overlapping sets
- Unintuitive
- no "popout"
