#graph-chooser

A treemap to guide what graph to use based on what variables you have

Live (unsynchronized) version here

Background

I'm working on a guide of what graph to use to plot your data. I'm not a statistician so I get confused when reading guides for what graphs to pick made my statisticans. They're all about intent. "What information specifically do you want to extract from the data?", "What message are you trying to convey?", "Are you looking for a relationship or a composition?", etc.

More often I just find myself with a bunch data and want to visualize it. Graphing it helps me understand it better. There's no other ulterior motive or goal. I just have a table and need to know how to represent it based soley on the data. So I'm creating this for myself and others like me.

Data organization/structure

I got stuck with the following scenario when first starting this project: I could take the same data and structure it differently, resulting in me not being sure how many and what kind of variables an item had.

For instance, I look at this table and think: There are four variables, one categorical and three numerical.

Season	Sales	Expenses	Profit
Winter	1000	400	200
Spring	1170	460	250
Summer	660	1120	300
Fall	1030	540	350

But I rearrange that table, with the exact same data, and suddenly it has three variables, two categorical and one numerical.

Season	Type	Dollars
Winter	Sales	1000
Winter	Expenses	400
Winter	Profit	250
Spring	Sales	1170
Spring	Expenses	460
Spring	Profit	250
Summer	Sales	660
Summer	Expenses	1120
Summer	Profit	300
Fall	Sales	1030
Fall	Expenses	540
Fall	Profit	350

The difference here is between wide and narrow data. For the purposes of this guide, everything will be in regards to the narrow structure (called long in R).

Example Images

These should be 400x400 .PNG files. I want to keep them square and I want to keep them small so they load quick. Time lags look really bizarre.

Where possible, use highcharts to get the image so the examples have a consistent appearance.

They must have the same filename (not including the extension) as their name in the data.json name attribute. The extension must be all lower case.

Ex. { "name": "Example graph name" } must have an image in the img directory called Example graph name.png

Questions

These should be consistent and exclusively about the data.

1. How many variables?

2. Numerical or categorical?

3. Are numerical variables discrete or continuous?

4. Are categorical variables ordinal or nominal?