Michael Jay Lissner
  • Home
  • About Site
  • Contact
  • Projects & Papers
  • Tags
  • Archives

Radar Analysis Charts: Fun, Trendy, BAD!

There is this trend that seems to be popping up everywhere of using radar charts such as this one:

No Alt

For the record people, these are bad. They imply that there is some circular relationship about your data points. They are line graphs made into a circle. If you want to indicate the volume under a curve, make a line graph, fill the area under your curve, and then consider it done. Don’t use these unless your data points progress from A → B → C and then back to A.

Please?

EDIT: I should add - don’t use line graphs for things that don’t progress from A to B to C either. For those things, use bar graphs, or column graphs.

I love getting feedback and comments. Make my day by making a comment.

Comments
comments powered by Disqus

  • « Music Stats
  • A Script to Kill Evolution »

Published

Oct 8, 2008

Category

Information Visualization & Statistics

Tags

  • bad statistics 2
  • visualizations 4

Contact

This is Reader-Editable

Edit this post on Github

Get Weekly Updates

  • Unless mentioned otherwise, all material on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons copyright or the GNU Affero GPL. Privacy Policy.
  • Powered by Pelican. Theme: Elegant by Talha Mansoor