Readings

Statistician Heal Thyself: Have We Lost the Plot?

Gordon, I., & Finch, S. (2015). Statistician Heal Thyself: Have We Lost the Plot? Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics: A Joint Publication of American Statistical Association, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Interface Foundation of North America, 24(4), 1210–1229.

• this is an article about graphics in science and statistics journals

• I think graphical display of data is much easier to parse than tabled data

  • but many (applied) journals specify a maximum of figures per article!

  a high quality graph should be able to be interpreted without elaboration

• Figure 1 shows a cluttered display

  • I think there\’s a ggplot2 function to push labels apart
  • yes, here it is: ggrepel

• Figure 2 provides a redesign

  • basically a small multiples plot
  • this is an improvement, but if the relationship is not monotone, then this figure would look a bit messy

• Figure 3 provides a scatterplot alternative

  • the authors suggest that it is easy to see that average lifespan increases with education, but I find this difficult
  • I can more easily see the decrease in lifespan variation with increasing education though

• Principle 3:

  Use good alignment on a common scale for quantities to be compared.

  • pie charts and stacked bar charts fail this principle
    • stacked bar charts because only one category (the bottom one) is aligned against the common axis
  • panel plots also fail this?

• The figures in the article themselves are fuzzy

  • perhaps the authors could have taken their own advice?!

• Detection was found to be the main issue

  • This refers to how we find out about features of the graph

• They provide a checklist at the end of the article for those producing graphics