mcs edits to error_bar.Rmd

[mcSamuelDataSci]

There is lots of great stuff in “error_bar.Rmd”, but quite a bit of it is more about statistics in general than the specific issue of error bars, and one cannot teach statistics in a few paragraphs. For example:

• “Error bars give a general idea of how precise a measurement is [this part is true], or conversely, how far from the reported value the true (error free) value might be [this part is less true, since bias is not addressed--I would leave this 2nd part off...]”

• Regarding the “Error bars hide information” section—the real issue is that summary statistics can hide information not just error bars. For a bimodal distribution, the mean is not a good summary measure…

• The whole discussion of difference in SD, SE and CI is great, and part of a basic statistics course…

I don’t agree that “It is better to avoid error bars as much as you can”—for presentation of bar charts to many audiences for many purposes the violin plot or boxplot with jitter is just too much for them to interpret, and appropriately labeled error bars are often way better than not including them at all.

Also, I was going to review the dual_axis.Rmd, but I couldn't find it rendered. The image below (mistakenly I think?) links to https://blog.datawrapper.de/dualaxis/ not to your good information.

Sorry I have slowed down on these reviews...I will get to all pages at some point!

Happy New Year!

[holtzy]

Hi Michael,

First of all, thanks again for your useful comments and edits!

I agree with what you've said above. It is also true that error bars are still better that not showing variation at all.. I think your discussion is very interesting and I was wondering if you could add it as a comment on the blog post?

Concerning the dual axis, I working on an interactive example to illustrate what the danger is. But it is on hold currently so I linked to the datawrapper post that is very well done IMO...

Thanks again!

Yan