Chapter 14. Techniques of graphical analysis
This chapter covers
In this chapter, I want to show you some more specialized techniques that are helpful when analyzing data graphically. We’ll look at a few examples in more detail, so that I can explain the different steps and the rationale behind them.
There are a few overarching ideas I want to convey here. First and foremost is the importance of iteration: the need to plot data, learn something about it, and plot it again in a different manner, until we’ve learned whatever was possible from it.
Another theme in this chapter is the importance of transformations, either mathematical transformations that we apply to the data, or (and this is a topic we haven’t touched on before in this book), visual transformations in which we change the overall appearance of the plot to make features in the data stand out. It turns out that our human perception of features in a graph can be helped or hindered by the way that data is presented, and in changing the appearance of a plot, we attempt to find the format that lets us recognize certain features most easily.
This chapter is also a good place to talk about some other housekeeping activities that help with the organization of our work. And I’ll close with a short checklist for presentation graphics.