October 2012
Beginner to intermediate
398 pages
10h 22m
English
book
Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data
by Jean Paul Isson, Jesse Harriott
Content preview from Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
VISUAL HONESTY: SIZE MATTERS
The next principle is that you must be careful in the visual representation of your data that you do not unintentionally skew the data and how they are represented. Specifically, you must represent the data in scales that are consistent, present the data truthfully, and do nothing to obfuscate the truth and accuracy of the data. As an example, take a look at Exhibit 6.7, which shows a simple representation of the number of milk cows over time.8 One must wonder whether the designer of this image had deception in mind or whether it was just ignorance. As we can see from the image, poor choices or deliberately deceptive choices in data visualization can result in a distorted picture of data and the relationships they represent.
Exhibit 6.7 The Crescive Cow
Source: From How to Lie with Statistics, by Darrell Huff, illustrated by Irving Geis, Copyright 1954 and renewed © 1982 by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
It’s a more common problem than you might think for charts to be designed in ways that hide what the data might tell us or distract the observer from discerning the true meaning of the evidence presented in the data visualization. In our example in Exhibit 6.7, the two numbers from the data are roughly 3 times the magnitude of the other but are represented by two cows, one of which is 27 times larger ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.