line charts

For the Greek hairdressers, the party’s over

In the beginning of the Greek debt crisis, Greek hairdressers became one of the symbols of a badly managed country (they could retire at 50 with full benefits). But there is more and more interesting things to say about them. Take a look at inflation rates for hairdressing salons and personal grooming establishments in Greece. … Read more

Chart redraw: Troops Vs. Cost (Time Magazine)

Time Magazine published a very boring combo dual-axes chart with a broken scale. Most of the time these charts beg for a connected scatterplot, so I made the one above. The original chart was something like this: I’m sorry, Time mag,  but my chart tells hands down a much more interesting story. [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column … Read more

Strange L-shaped trends

There is not much of a story in the expected evolution of US population, according to the United Nations estimates and projections (1950-2100): (You’ll see in a moment why there is a vertical line in 2005.) Things get a little more interesting if you split population by age groups. You can see that population is … Read more

The health benefits of line charts

I recently bought a pedometer to make sure I walk at least those recommended 10,000 steps a day. As you can see, there is a strong variation, and no meaningful pattern is emerging. Now that I’m blogging about it, I’m sure that will happen soon :). It’s commonly accepted that, when displaying a time series, … Read more

Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling.

If you are a market researcher, and you want to make sure that you get more reliable results for a subgroup in a survey, what do you do? You must increase the overall sample size (and spend a lot of money), right? Actually, you don’t. You can oversample that group only, and then weight it … Read more

Can You See the Chart Under the Notes?

Annotating your chart helps your audience to understand the reasons behind some patterns or outliers. But, please, please, don’t bury the data under boxes and arrows and busy grid lines, like this one on the right does (from WTRG Economics). How can you improve a chart like this? First of all, the series must be … Read more