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oldoc63 / learningDS

Learning DS with Codecademy and Books
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Why charts and not only tables of frequencies #504

Open oldoc63 opened 1 year ago

oldoc63 commented 1 year ago

You work at a veterinary office and want to compare the number of different types of pets people have in a specific town. This will give you a sense of what supplies you may need and how many office visits you should expect over the coming year. The different types of pets we want to compare are:

Dogs
Cats
Fish
Chinchillas
Birds
Snakes
Lizards
oldoc63 commented 1 year ago

We could summarize this data numerically using a table of frequencies:

Type of Pet | Number of Pets -- | -- Dogs | 4325 Birds | 2423 Cats | 5126 Fish | 3223 Chinchillas | 978 Snakes | 1112 Lizards | 453
oldoc63 commented 1 year ago

This table of values is informative for a reader. However, it is time-consuming for a casual reader to recognize patterns in the data and pick out useful information. We can create a bar chart that displays our data in a way that is easier for readers to digest and more descriptive than a table of values.

In this example, we can immediately identify the most and least popular pets on the bar chart. We also see the range and difference between the number of each pet in each column very clearly.

oldoc63 commented 1 year ago

Visualizing categorical data mainly involves the use of pie charts and bar charts. The image to the right shows both of them as well as slight variants. In this lesson, we will explore both of these graphs including:

use cases
pros and cons
modifying them for best communication