Field note · September 27, 2024

The category that eats the chart

30 values with 3.3% concentrated in one of them, and what that does to every chart downstream.

1 min read ·Visualization ·visualization practice

country on world-indicators has 30 values, and one of them is 3.3% of the data.

  • Anselm — 24 rows, 3.3%
  • Avalonia — 24 rows, 3.3%
  • Belmara — 24 rows, 3.3%
  • Brasilia Nova — 24 rows, 3.3%
  • Cairnvale — 24 rows, 3.3%

The top three take 10.0% between them. The remaining 27 share 90.0%, which is the part that gets rendered as an unreadable stack of slivers if you plot all of them.

sql
select country,
       count(*)                                      as rows,
       round(100.0 * count(*) / sum(count(*)) over (), 1) as pct,
       round(avg(gdp_per_capita_usd)::numeric, 2)             as avg_gdp_per_capita_usd
from world_indicators
group by 1
order by rows desc;

The second column is the one that matters. Share of rows tells you what is common; avg_gdp_per_capita_usd tells you whether the common thing is the important thing. They disagree more often than not, and a chart that shows only the first is answering the easier question.

Decide what happens to the tail before you plot it. "Other" as an explicit bucket is honest; twelve slivers is not, and neither is silently taking the top eight.