Visualization

Lately I’ve been drinking the Kool Aid about data visualization and the graphical presentation of quantitative results. Regression results, for example, are usually presented in a tabular format. There’s nothing wrong with that mode of presentation, but there isn’t anything especially right about it either. My guess would be that it became a standard format because, before the desktop computing revolution, it was much easier to typeset a table than to include a picture. That’s no longer the case. Using Stata, R or even Excel, I can actually make a nice looking graph faster than I can make a pretty table.

Presenting things graphically can make interpretation easier. Of course, it’s important to ensure that you don’t misrepresent the data with your graphic, which is easy to do accidentally in the process of trying to get it to fit on the page. And I think that figures should still be accompanied by detailed tables, which can present data with more accuracy.

But ultimately I think it comes down to an ego thing. I think that people feel that pictures are for the weak. Real men look at tables, not charts, right? Once I got over that same prejudice when it came to mathematics, I noticed a sudden increase in my ability to solve complicated problems. And there’ s no shame in that. The work of Einstein and Feynman is littered with impromptu sketches and graphs.

Here are the pretty pictures I made today (they are regression results showing the midpoint and upper and lower bounds of the 95% confidence interval):

There are a few cool blogs about stats and data visualization. Check out Data Visualization and Visual Culture and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference and Social Science for a sampling.