Stat. Graphics & Data Visualization

That's it for the 2007 chaos tour. Looking at the time distributions makes everybody above the median quite suspicious ... more doping cases to come - maybe including A.C.

Although many people claim little interest in the tour after the many doping cases, this is all the more a reason to check whether we will find a structural change of the 2007 race compared to the races of the years 2006 and 2005.

Stage Results	cumulative Time	Ranks
(click on the images to enlarge)

Prologue: Andreas KLÖDEN - one of the "last big ones" left - No.2
Stage 01: calm ride through the English country side ...
Stage 02: one big crash and one time for all
Stage 03: CANCELLARA defends the jersey impressively
Stage 04: HUSHOVD'S day!
Stage 05: VINOKOUROV falls back after his crash
Stage 06: Another day to rest - not only for VINOKOUROV and KLÖDEN
Stage 07: GERDEMANN aiming at white, rewarded with yellow - more than a 1-shot?
Stage 08: Nobody could stop RASMUSSEN!
Stage 09: Last stage in the Alpes and 18 drop-outs so far
Stage 10: German television stops live broadcasting after SINKEWITZ's case came up
Stage 11: VANSEVENANT 'defends' his last place successfully ...
Stage 12: A day to rest on the bike.
Stage 13: VINOKOUROV "found his legs again", at least for a day.
Stage 14: RASMUSSEN still in yellow - despite the doping case ...
Stage 15: Another stage for VINOKOUROV
Stage 16: VINOKOUROV's case end the tour for team Astana
Stage 17: "A team a day keeps doping away ..."
...

(Thanks to Sergej for updating the scripts) 

Giving a clear separation between presentation graphics and graphics for data exploration is not always easy, because many aspects of the graphics are shared by both types. I very much liked the distinction Antony Unwin gave during one of his latest talks.

Pie charts are as popular as entertaining. The latest highlight of chartjunk is here:

This time it is easy for me, as I just need to point to the interesting discussion at Junk Charts.

The original graphics is from the NYT:

The "improved" plot looks like this:

The advantages of the box-plot view (from Junkcharts)

• The European market is much more fragmented than the U.S. market.
• The Big 2 (GM, Ford) has had mixed fortunes over this period (as indicated by the large variance)
• The Big 2 are competitive in Europe although they are definitely not dominant there
• Several key players in Europe (Peugeot, Renault, Fiat, BMW) have negligible shares in the U.S

The discussion was quite lengthy, but had the two major points:

• Boxplots are too hard to read for NYT readers
• The boxplots ignore the temporal information and thus are not really suitable for this data

One important point was not mentioned explicitly, which is

• Sorting is a very powerful and important option in graphics

There is truth to all the issues raised here, and the bottom line is probably that there might be not a single graphical view on the data which covers all aspects of the data. Furthermore, the NYT graphics is by far the most eye-pleasing version of all suggestions.

In this spirit I want to throw in two more versions which show the data:
Two variations of Mosaic Plots (will be explained in the next 'statistical graphics 101') in the multiple barchart view. European cars are highlighted:

(Year x Brand x Continent)

(Continent x Brand x Year)