Hi, I’m Adriene Hill, and this is Crash

Course Statistics.

So, for the last few episodes we’ve discussed

ways to summarize data using numbers.

We used measures of central tendency and measures

of spread.

But sometimes it can be helpful to actually

*see* your data in addition to having numbers

to describe it.

Data visualizations are important to understand

because you’ll see them everyday.

In the news, on Facebook, in magazines.

Maybe I’ll make an infographic of all the

places we see data visualizations.

INTRO

There are two main types of data that we might

encounter: categorical and quantitative.

Quantitative data are quantities, numbers

that have both order and consistent spacing.

For example, how many ounces of olive oil

are in each American home.

If three families told you how many ounces

of olive oil they have, you could put them

in a meaningful order--from least to greatest,

or greatest to least.

This order also has consistent spacing, an

increase in 1 ounce of olive oil is the same

whether you go from 0 to 1 ounce, or from

100 to 101 ounces.

These properties allow us to do simple math

with the data--like taking the mean or calculating

the standard deviation.

Categorical data doesn’t have a meaningful

order or consistent spacing.

For example, favorite kind of pasta.

You might like penne, rotini, linguine, or

even Angel Hair, but there’s no objective

way to put those pastas into a meaningful

order.

Is penne truly better than linguine?

Where does rotini fit in?

It would be pasta madness to try to put them

in order.

The simplest way to display categorical data

is to make a frequency table.

A frequency table shows you all of the categories

and the number of data points that fall in

that category (in other words, its frequency).

To change a frequency table into a relative

frequency table, we just need to take each

raw frequency and divide by the number of

total points to get a decimal between 0 and 1.

Some of you may be used to reading decimals

as percentages, but if you’re not, just

multiply by 100 to get the percentage.

For linguine we have 10/50 which is 0.2 or

20% of the group.

Relative frequency tables have the benefit

of being easy to compare.

No matter what we’re measuring or how many

data points we have, it’s easy to compare

percentages.

If 20% of people like linguine, we can see

that’s a smaller percent than the 67% of

people who like pineapple on pizza or greater

than the 10% of my family who thinks statistics

are scary.

The relative frequency table for favorite

pasta might look like this.

We can also add more than one variable to

our frequency table.

We could ask people to rate their favorite

pasta sauce and make a combined frequency

table, or a contingency table, of both pasta

and sauce preference.
If I were planning a party, and needed to
pick some pasta for the group, my best bets

would be Rotini with Red Sauce and Penne with

Red or White sauce.

And because I’m planning a party and because

I’m having food, I did look it up: the chance

of death by choking on food in the US in a

given year is 1 in 100,686

But, sometimes we don’t want just numbers

in our visualization.

Earlier in the series, I talked about how it can be hard to wrap your head around
numbers--especially

when they get really big or really small.

There are other more visual ways to represent

categorical data.

One way to do this is with a bar chart.

A bar chart uses the frequencies that we saw

in our frequency table to create bars that

have a height equal to the frequency.

That way, we can compare the height of bars

instead of looking at raw numbers.

Here’s a bar chart representing the pasta

data we saw in our original frequency table.

You can see that penne is by *far* the most

chosen pasta, and how it compares to Angel Hair.

Bar charts display a lot of information in

a very simple graph, they can also display

the frequencies of multiple variables.

Let’s say we want to compare each of these

pasta types with either white or red sauce.

We can either stack frequencies so it gives

us the same information as our contingency

table, or we can have bar charts side by side.

Pie charts are another way of displaying categorical

data.

They use the relative frequency of categories

to portion out pieces of a Circle, just like

a pie.
The higher the relative frequency, the bigger
the slice of pie a category gets.

Pie charts are useful because our eyes are

pretty good at comparing slices.

Our pasta data in a pie chart looks like this.

Pie charts are great at visually displaying

one variable.

But they struggle to effectively display more

than one variable, like our pasta and sauces

contingency table.

Another way to display categorical data is

a pictograph.

Pictographs represent frequency with pictures.

A picture, like the ball in this basketball

participation graph, will represent some number

of units, say 100 kids.

So if Riverdale High had 550 students participate

in their basketball programs, then the graph

would show 5.5 basketballs.

Sometimes pictographs represent frequencies

by increasing the size of the picture instead

and it’s not wrong, but it’s more difficult

for us to visually compare, especially for

small differences, which can be misleading.

Plus, at a casual glance, we don’t know

what the size difference means.

Are we comparing the diameter of the basketballs?

Or are we comparing their areas?

*BREAKING NEWS*

This is Channel 2 News.

Looks like all you students out there are

really hitting the books!

Data from the US Department of Education shows

the graduation rate has been climbing!

So way to go everybody!
You’re passing the test of life with flying
colors!

Let’s push that stack of books even higher!

So, that last pictograph...not at all to scale.

See how the stacks of books are not proportionate?

It shows a difference of 5% (from 75% - 80%)

with a stack of books that is over *double*

the height of the 75% stack.

This makes the difference seem huge because

the axis doesn’t start at 0.

And yet, an increase of 80-81% is shown by

two stacks that are BARELY different in height,

even though the 5% difference looks huge.

Always keep on eye on those axes.

Let’s loop back to quantitative data, which

as you’ll remember, have a meaningful order

and consistent spacing.

Frequency tables can be used to display quantitative

data, like age, or height, or ounces of olive

oil in your house.

We just have to create categories out of our

quantitative data first.

We do that with a process called “binning”.

Binning takes a quantitative variable and

bins it into categories hthat are either pre-existing

or made up.

For example I can say that 0-15 oz of olive

oil is “Very Little”, 16-32 oz is “Average”,

33-49 oz is “A Lot” and 50+ oz is “Excessive”--like

suspiciously Excessive.

Like Will’s 14 cats excessive.

Why do you need so much olive oil?

Anyway, once I’ve binned my data, I can

create a frequency table or relative frequency

table, just like with our pasta example.

It might look something like this.

Binning is most useful when there’s pre-existing

“bins” for our data.

Like, you can divide age-in-years into the

bins “Child”, “Teen”, “Adult”

and “Older Adult” because those are pre-existing

categories.

We can also take a score on a depression test

and create two bins: “clinically depressed”

and “not clinically depressed”.

You can see from this example that bins don’t

HAVE to be equally spaced, but if you see

quantitative data that has been binned, make sure that the way it was divided up
was appropriate

for the situation.

Unequally spaced bins can be misleading unless

there’s a real world distinction to back

it up.

Say politician X wants to make himself look

popular, but it seems like people in their

30’s really hate him.

(probably because he said that the reason

they can’t afford a house is their brunch

habit).

Politician X wants to hide the fact that over

80% of people in their 30’s said they won’t

vote for him.

So he does some “re-binning”.

Traditionally the data are binned roughly

by decade 18 years old to 29 years old, 30

years old to 39 years old, 40 to 49...you

get the point.

But Mr. X needs to hide these hateful 30-somethings

in the data.

The old chart looked like this:

But Politician X decided to split up the 30-somethings

to make his numbers look better:
He moved the data around to hide the glaring
group of 30 year old dissenters.

Instead of showing the truth that 30-somethings

despise him, we see a more...positive view

of his popularity.

By splitting the 30-somethings and putting

some of them into two other, larger groups,

he can obscure their political dissatisfaction.

Looking at this new table, he’d win the

popularity vote in each of the 5 new bins.

If I don’t show you the number of voters

per bin, it seems legit...

Another categorical graphing method we can

apply to quantitative data is bar charts.

When we use bar charts for quantitative data,

we squish the bars together so that they’re

touching and we call them histograms.

The bars are squished together because the

data are ‘continuous’ which means the

values in one bar flow into the next bar,

there’s no separation like in our categorical

bar charts.

In histograms, like bar charts, the height

of the bars tell us how frequently data in

a certain range occur.

A histogram also gives us information about

how the data is distributed.

We can estimate where the mean, median and

mode of our data are as well as see how spread

out the data is.

Look at this histogram for our olive oil data.

For this histogram, we can see that the range

of the data is approximately 85 since it covers

value 0-85 ounces and that it’s right skewed

(the tail is to the right), and that it’s

center is around 25 ounces.

The histogram gives us more information about
the data than a frequency table does, but

they’re still obscuring WHAT the specific

data values are.

If you read the news--or watch the news--you

will see these representations over and over

and over.

You will likely see far more of these charts

and graph than you will create.

The big take away here, as a consumer of these

things, is to look closely at what the visualization

is actually telling you.

Or maybe trying to hide from you.

These charts and graphs give us another way

to comprehend numbers--to see the big picture.

Thanks for watching!

I’ll see you next week.