When Is It Wrong to Use Bar Charts?
Don't get me wrong, bar charts can be a great tool for Data Visualization, especially when used for displaying counts, totals or proportions. However, using them in the wrong way can lead to unintentional (or even worse, intentional) data misinterpretation. The particular issue I will be talking about today is using bar charts to present aggregated summary statistics such as means or medians.
The biggest problem here is the loss of detail as bar charts can oversimplify, leaving out important information such as variance, distribution, outliers, and trends. In this post I will illustrate this problem using a series of examples and propose potential solutions. In order to not interfere with the flow of the post, the code for the charts will be specified at the end for those who are interested
