On 2020/05/13 23:11, Dirk Hohndel via subsurface wrote:
The video that Pedro linked to seemed to indicate that the first chart is most likely to be understood, and that the the second one was harder to see trends in.

Conflicting with that is the desire to more typically show bar graphs sideways, as that makes it easier to deal with many data sets (think labeling the columns vs. labeling rows)

So all this is super helpful in figuring out how we should visualize these things - but not necessarily all leading to the same answers, as I'm not sure how well these line graphs work when turned 90 degrees :-)

/D



On May 13, 2020, at 12:53 PM, Hartley Horwitz <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

I"ve attached 3 graphs showing the statistics summary.  Once again I showed them to a work colleague.  He found the upper 2 graphs easiest to understand.

...Hartley

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 3:24 PM Dirk Hohndel <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:

    That is excellent input!

    Your final point is one that I had kinda assumed - most of the
    "more interesting" data no one but a geek will look into. And to
    them either box and whiskers (so quartiles) or at least floating
    box with mean (or your version in the first SAC chart below with
    the 0 based box with the mean as height and with whiskers for
    min/max) should make sense. But it also makes sense to look for
    simper ways to give access to the same data. Can you give an
    example for the "line graph with 3 lines for min/mean/max"?

    Thanks

    /D



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I must admit that I do not like any of these three representations. They are inappropriate and inaccurate, leading to misinterpretation.

The top graph is normally used to indicate trends in three *independent* variables that may or may not be correlated. In the dive the data represent a *single* variable with its min and max values.

The middle graph is a histogram that would normally also represent three *independent* variables that have been sampled on the same x-axis scale. Again, in the dive case the min and max values represent the *same* variable.

The bottom graph is normally used to indicate the proportion of a total that is formed by a specific component. In the case of this specific graph, the median would be indicated by the height of the orange bar (i.e. vertical distance between the grey-orange border and the orange/blue border). The max would be indicated by the height of the blue part of the graph, etc. Clearly this is not what is meant.

I want to make a call that, if we are dealing with representing statistics, we actually use the proper statistics representations that we are all used to. Most likely that is either some variant of a box and whiskers diagram or a vertical bar chart with error bars. If these diagrams have been shown once to an uninformed person, the interpretation will always be easy. Lets use diagrams for what they are meant to convey and not use a sports car to drive offroad. We do not want any statistics related to Subsurface to be presented in an unprofessional and inappropriate way.

As far as the horizontal graphs are concerned, they have a place, but we need to understand where they come from, and that is from the old days when we tried to print graphs on a mainframe line printer that could not print characters vertically. The conventional way to represent histograms or bar charts is in the vertical way *unless there is good reason to do otherwise*. These days there is no problem in printing labels vertically. To have a horizontal bar graph with depth measurements along the vertical axis is just totally unorthodox and not up to modern standards.

Kind regards,

willem








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