Deceiving with bad visualizations
Why is it important to know how to read a visualization? Why is it essential to create accurate graphs? The objective and primary goal of data visualization is to facilitate the recognition and identification of trends, outliers, and patterns in small and big datasets. In this situation, we use the term data visualization to refer to the process of converting collected data into a visual representation such as a graph, table, or even a map.
According to Alberto Cairo, the following frequent fallacies surround visualizations:
- A picture is worth a thousand words
- A visualization is intuitive
- The data should speak for itself
- Show don’t tell
And his statement is correct, if people don’t know how to read, understand and interpret visualizations.
Unfortunately, we get misled and misinformed in a variety of ways; we will look at several examples to learn how to identify misleading graphs.
Figure 7.4 shows two...
