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My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

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Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#11

Post by hagy »

neilbowers wrote: post #3

That's a terrible visualization. It takes way too long to work out what "the story" is.

I wouldn’t say it’s a terrible visualization, although in general I do believe conditional 2D plots are the best way to show trends in higher dimensions. For example, here are some conditional plots for similar data (Kaggle Titanic competition) that I’ve found insightful.

http://i.imgur.com/C4uyH.png

The conditioning on Sex/Class seems to be the best way to illustrate the trends in these 4 dimensions.

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#12

Post by radicalbyte »

nicpottier wrote: post #8

Jesus, is that visualization supposed to help? I stared at it for minutes and I still don't really grok it. Seems like it is trying to channel a similar method as the Napolean March: http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean... But failing completely at it. In any case, is this a common type of visualization now? Maybe with some experience it becomes easy to grok what is happening?

No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations? Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts.

I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to read:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info...

Information Dashboard Design http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effecti...

Now You See http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-Few/dp/097060198...

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#13

Post by hagy »

zerostar07 wrote: post #4

Curious about what other libraries people use. Matplotlib? Matlab?

I’d strongly recommend matplotlib. It has a matlab like procedural interface that makes it very easy to pickup if you’re coming from matlab.

Additionally, it’s wonderful to be able to “dive under the hood” if you need to create a special type of visualization: i.e. the internal model is easy to understand and highly customizable. This has enabled me to create several awesome plots that would have been very difficult, if not impossible to create with any other plotting program or library.

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#15

Post by nashequilibrium »

I really thought hard for a minute if the author was joking, the visualization is really terrible. I would rather look at the table than the visualization, i found this pycon talk really nice explaining dataViz patterns: http://pyvideo.org/video/637/data-design-meaning

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#17

Post by SiVal »

nicpottier wrote: post #8

Jesus, is that visualization supposed to help? I stared at it for minutes and I still don't really grok it. Seems like it is trying to channel a similar method as the Napolean March: http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean... But failing completely at it. In any case, is this a common type of visualization now? Maybe with some experience it becomes easy to grok what is happening?

I eventually figured it out, but there was no AHA! about it. I had to slowly pick it apart every step of the way, like working through an obfuscated C contest entry.

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#18

Post by tgb »

radicalbyte wrote: post #12
nicpottier wrote: post #8

Jesus, is that visualization supposed to help? I stared at it for minutes and I still don't really grok it. Seems like it is trying to channel a similar method as the Napolean March: http://bryanrulli.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/tufte_napolean... But failing completely at it. In any case, is this a common type of visualization now? Maybe with some experience it becomes easy to grok what is happening?

No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations? Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts. I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to read: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info... Information Dashboard Design http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-D…

Ironically, the OP recommends that you read The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, as well. I suspect that the mediocre example (I thought it was reasonably readable and somewhat interesting) was there more as a demonstration of the fact that R makes non-scatter plots easily, too.

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#19

Post by dbecker »

zerostar07 wrote: post #4

Curious about what other libraries people use. Matplotlib? Matlab?

Python is my go-to language, so I use matplotlib frequently. But I think R's ggplot2 is easily the best visualization library out there.

Bokeh is supposed to be a ggplot2 clone for python, but it's still in the very early stages.

Re: My First Recommendation to New Scientific Coders: Learn Visualization

#20

Post by TeMPOraL »

sprobertson wrote: post #7
neilbowers wrote: post #3

That's a terrible visualization. It takes way too long to work out what "the story" is.

It's really only useful when interactive - http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ - and it still takes a while to figure out what's going on.

Clicking on a Show icicle plot! checkbox down in the article converts this visualization to something much more readable.
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