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blog/five-ways-improve-chart-axes/ #22

Open utterances-bot opened 2 months ago

utterances-bot commented 2 months ago

Five ways to improve your chart axes | Nicola Rennie

A poor choice of axes for your chart can make it more difficult to understand, and in some cases, suggest misleading conclusions. In this blog post, we'll look at five ways to make better choices about your axes and stop relying on default settings.

https://nrennie.rbind.io/blog/five-ways-improve-chart-axes/

AlexWeinreb commented 2 months ago

Nice post! For 1, I'm not a big fan of showing both the full and zoomed in version, seems potentially confusing. In the case the small deviations matter, I would question if a bar plot is the most appropriate, maybe a box plot/violin plot or pointrange have the advantage of showing the value, without highlighting the difference from 0.

In 5, another way to order categories that is occasionally a good idea is to cluster them with some similarity. It's common for heatmaps (particularly in bioinformatics), but even for a bar plot there may occasionally be a reason to group categories (but it's clearly not the majority of cases).