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The case against dual axis charts (and what to use instead) (2018)

152 点作者 Leftium12 个月前

19 条评论

joshe12 个月前
Context is important, this is targeted at journalists. They are usually trying to make a point to casual readers.<p>For readers with more interest or who are numerate in their day jobs (engineers, finance, or economists), dual axis charts can often be a great choice.<p>This is better graph style advice from the Economist, which includes good dual axis examples and one bad one and how to correct it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.economist.com&#x2F;mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.economist.com&#x2F;mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8...</a><p>Since we are engineers or founders trying to deal with very complex systems, adding detail and clarity like the Economist or Edward Tufte does is the better way to go.
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Leftium12 个月前
Found this while trying to create an observable plot with multiple scales[1][2].<p>I&#x27;d argue multiple scales are OK if the multiple axes have different units that can&#x27;t be easily compared&#x2F;confused and are used for greater information density (instead of relative comparison purposes).<p>For example: I&#x27;d like to plot weather stats like hourly temperature, precipitation, and AQI throughout the day, so several different days can be compared with each other. (And fit all this information on a mobile screen.)<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;observablehq&#x2F;plot&#x2F;issues&#x2F;147">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;observablehq&#x2F;plot&#x2F;issues&#x2F;147</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;observablehq&#x2F;plot&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;626">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;observablehq&#x2F;plot&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;626</a>
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tqi12 个月前
1. I&#x27;m not sure why having two charts side by side helps?<p>2. Indexed charts are also not a panacea - depending on what point on the x axis you choose as your starting point, it is easy to make it seem like one series is rapidly outpacing the other (ie choosing to start at the peak).<p>Ultimately I think charts are best thought of as a way to communicate a conclusion, not be the primary source for drawing a conclusion. Figure out what point you are trying to convey and choose the chart that communicates that the best.
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rossdavidh12 个月前
So, it&#x27;s great that they try to actually get data on what kinds of charts convey what information. However, you need to know who your audience is. I, for example, found all of their suggested alternatives to be harder to interpret than the dual axis chart. If you&#x27;re trying to see whether or not the ups and downs of two different variables are similar, suggesting a connection between the two, none of the suggested alternatives do as good a job (although two charts could, if instead of having them side by side you had them one above the other, with the same x-axis scale, but that is really just a stealth dual axis chart).<p>Most of these &quot;don&#x27;t use this kind of chart&quot; seems to be trying to make it impossible to confuse or mislead your audience, and that is just not plausible. You do, and probably usually should, have some point in mind when you are showing someone else a chart, and the format needs to make it easy to see that. Almost any chart, even pie charts, have some particular use case where they are the best chart for that purpose. No chart is going to always be the best way to present data. Like choosing what kind of language to use in explaining something, you need to know something about who your audience is, and what they are accustomed to.
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einpoklum12 个月前
The first couple of arguments are weak:<p>1. It&#x27;s possible to mislead by playing with a single series&#x27; scale, you don&#x27;t need two series to lie-with-statistics...<p>2. The argument that people will think the data are identical despite the different scale? Don&#x27;t buy it.
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jdeaton12 个月前
I once worked with someone who was doing performance benchmarking of two systems, and made a duel axis chart with the lines right on top of eachother when in fact one system was like 5x faster than the other. it drove me nuts because I didn&#x27;t even realize the dual axis at first and thought that they literally had identical performance
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gcanyon12 个月前
Something that occurs to me: there&#x27;s [not much|nothing] special about &quot;dual&quot; axis charts, meaning: in general the graph matches color with the axis, but there&#x27;s nothing &quot;right&quot; vs. &quot;left&quot; about the graphs. Therefore, there&#x27;s nothing special about &quot;dual&quot; axis charts being right- and left-axis, and you could just as easily put both axes on the left (at a little loss in clarity). And finally, that means you could just as easily have three, four, or more axes.<p>Not really -- obviously a chart with six axes on the left and six different color-coordinated graphs would be absurd, but that&#x27;s my point: there&#x27;s nothing that makes a two-axis graph less absurd other than scale.<p>All of which to say: if there&#x27;s no real correlation that you&#x27;re trying to illustrate between the data series, then separate charts are the way to go. If there <i>is</i> a correlation, there&#x27;s (probably) a better way to illustrate it.
jrd25912 个月前
I&#x27;d argue that the zero value should always be shown. Otherwise you get different impressions of the rate depending how you scale and subset the Y axis.
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o0-0o12 个月前
Great article. I used to be into charting a lot and ran a charting product at a famous firm. Would love to see the thoughts of the author on other charts like radar and treemap. :) Great read.
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treflop12 个月前
I find plotting two correlated but unrelated data series (like temperature and humidity) can be fine.<p>But the article chooses the worst possible dual axis charts where both data series not only measure the same thing (GDP) but share the same units (dollars). What you actually have is a multiple data series chart with actually one axis but you made two to be confusing.
erehweb12 个月前
I get it, and sympathize, but at many companies the decision maker is someone who wants to see dual axis charts. If Datawrapper can&#x27;t do that, then that would be a point against using it widely.
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ajuc12 个月前
In case of German GDP vs Global GDP I&#x27;d argue the correct thing to do is to draw a graph of a new variable &quot;German GDP as a percentage of Global GDP&quot; and a separate graph of Global GDP.
aj712 个月前
No. You’re missing two arrows, each near its graph and pointing to the corresponding y-axis. This has more impact than color matching.
patrick45112 个月前
What a patronizing company. Your customers keep asking for a feature that is widely supported and you refuse to add it because it violates your sensibilities. Instead, you write this diatribe lecturing us that the way we want to display data is wrong. Just reading the opening paragraph, whatever interest I may have had in your plotting capabilities evaporated.
ghssds12 个月前
An article about how to do charts, which itself uses charts with labels so small they are unreadable while also disabling zooming, lack credibility.
pasc187812 个月前
I would be the one in the sample who did not find the charts confusing.<p>The two separate graphs are much more difficult to compare - you can&#x27;t see which elements compare to the same year so lose a lot of information.<p>The information in the chart is if there is a change in one time series is there a change in the other. - that is probably all you can infer as without error bars you can&#x27;t see if the differences are material. (ie I know they are different scales so when they cross they obviously aren&#x27;t the same.) If so there might be a correlation which might be worth looking into remembering correlation does not equal causation (so the example in the link are just laughable)<p>The prioritisation just shows nothing.<p>The scatterplot shows nothing<p>The indexed chart does make sense and in this case I would agree would be better.
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thedudeabides512 个月前
Eh, how about look at the axis units when someone is pitching you something.
goldemerald12 个月前
Solution 4 is so hilariously bad I am shocked it was suggested. Building a 2d landscape where the time dimension seems to take a random walk made laugh a lot. Ignoring the standard convention of &quot;independent variable on x-axis&quot; and instead embedding it as datapoints is a particularly clever way to obfuscate the data and confuse the reader.
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cs70212 个月前
I&#x27;m 100% in agreement.<p>To anyone here who thinks plots with two different scales in the same direction sometimes are appropriate:<p>Please read this.<p>---<p>EDIT: Changed &quot;dual axis charts&quot; to &quot;plots with two different scales in the same direction,&quot; which more accurately describes the OP&#x27;s topic.
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