Monday, November 3, 2014

Make your own hotly criticised circle graph!!!

Make your own hotly criticized circle graph! The recent critical post on R-bloggers has got me wanting to make my own bubble graphs despite the popular criticism of the graph. After some attempts I have produced something that looks similar but needs some more work.

I would like to say briefly that R-blogger post by while interesting and reasonable seemed to miss the point. The graphic was not supposed to convey massive amounts of information but simply to make obvious the scope and degree of how the current Ebola epidemic compares with other epidemics.

There are many good reasons to critique this graph from an epidemiological perspective (forthcoming), yet from a graphing perspective I think  this graph format is extremely efficient at conveying memorable information while the graphs assembled by PirateGrunt were more detailed they were also entirely forgettable unfortunately.

Here are a couple of examples. The first is with meaningless simulated data demonstrating how large differences in scale may appear. The second is actually using HIV prevalence data to give a graphical representation of how such rates have changed over the years. You can fine the code as well as the data on github.

Table 1: Demonstrates how scale can be communicated by size of circle


Table 2: Demonstrates the relative stability of AIDS in terms of people ill. Top number is  year while lower number is millions of cases.

1 comment:

  1. At least you gave me "interesting and reasonable". :-)

    One person that I know (and I'm certain there are many more) has defended the display.It still leaves me cold. Presenting numeric data in an informative and compelling way is a challenge that we all live with. One inescapable reality is that universal appeal is very likely impossible. So long as everyone greets things with a critical eye, we have an opportunity to improve. Thank you for doing so.

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