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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
They're not lying with statistics.
They're lying with the misleading graphical representation of statistics.
(the sort of thing you'd find in a "[strike]management[/strike] executive summary")
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
That graph is misleading, I would say, because the people-figures look like they're representing numbers, apart from what the axes and figures are telling you.
I've made a lot of graphs for investment banks. We do a lot of split-axes graphs, but generally, would start the axes like that. It really depends on whether they wanted to accentuate the change or not. But I really wouldn't use people-figures like that.
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
ursus arctos wrote: I read him as only referring to the X-axis, which I don't have a problem with (assuming that this wasn't done at the end of 2013 or later).
Think I need more coffee.
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
Ok, sorry, but I do have to work with problems of visual data representation - and although it's mostly been in banking, it's also been in NGOs, representing sensitive things like mortality. It's hard to show a significant change clearly without distorting or misleading, although your narrative, labels and titles should make it clear.
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
MsD wrote: Ok, sorry, but I do have to work with problems of visual data representation - and although it's mostly been in banking, it's also been in NGOs, representing sensitive things like mortality. It's hard to show a significant change clearly without distorting or misleading, although your narrative, labels and titles should make it clear.
Personally, if my intention was not to mislead the readers, I'd publish this data as a table.
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How to lie with statistics, pt. 8,243,721.5
A directional arrow between each set of columns with the change percentage e.g "+5%" would clarify a bit. That's what I'd do, probably, but in a serious report (where you want people to really absorb the info), yes, a table, maybe in addition to a graph.
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