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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

#22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's from http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ and is one of the example plots for http://d3js.org/

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

#23

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've seen a clearer version of the same chart; when it doesn't show children it is much easier to understand what is going on.

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

#25

The table for "Age = Child, Survived = No" is the same as the table for "Age = Adult, Survived = No". Odd, to say the least. One wonders where this interesting fact is shown in the visualization.

If that were true, that would mean first and second class completely survived. But the visualization shows this is not the case.

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

#27
post #13

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,…

I completely agree about the breadth of matplotlib, though the difficulty can be looking for examples. I've often found the examples on the matplotlib website to be horribly out of date compared to features added in recent releases. Are the plots you've done available online / Any recommended blogs for interesting examples of plotting?

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

#28

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

Physicist here.. I use CERN ROOT as it does just about everything. Occasionally I'll mix it up with python and matplotlib. GNUPlot is still great though too.

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

#29
post #22
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's from http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ and is one of the example plots for http://d3js.org/

I must say that the icicle plot of the same data is way more readable. The crisscrossing lines are all but useless to get a feel of the data.

go to http://www.jasondavies.com/parallel-sets/ and click on icicle plot to see what is going on.

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

#30

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?

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