Analytics magazines: Please lead the way for effective data presentation

Professional "analytics" associations such INFORMS, the American Statistical Association, and the Royal Statistical Society, have been launching new magazines intended for broader, non-academic audiences that are involved or interested in data analytics. Several of these magazines are aesthetically beautiful with plenty of interesting articles about applications of data analysis and their impact on daily life, society, and more. Significance magazine and Analytics magazine are two examples.

The next step is for these magazines to implement what we preach regarding data presentation: use effective visualizations. In particular, the online versions can include interactive dashboards! If the New York Times and Washington Post can have interactive dashboards on their websites, so can magazines of statistics and operations research societies.

For example, the OR/MS Today magazine reports the results of an annual "statistical software survey" in the form of multi-page tables in the hardcopy and PDF versions of the magazine. These tables are not user friendly in the sense that it is difficult to explore and compare the products and tools. Surprisingly, the online implementation is even worse: a bunch of HTML pages, each with one static table.

Presenting the survey results in multi-page tables is not the most user-friendly (from Feb 2013 issue of OR/MS Today magazine)

To illustrate the point, I have converted the 2013 Statistical Software Survey results into an interactive dashboard. The user can examine and compare particular products or tools of interest using filters, sort the products by different attributes, and get a quick idea about pricing. Maybe not the most fascinating data, especially given the many missing values, yet I hope the dashboard is more effective and engaging.

Interactive dashboard. Click on the image to go to the dashboard

Analytics: You want to be in Asia

Business Intelligence and Data Mining have become hot buzzwords in the West. Using Google Insights for Search to "see what the world is searching for" (see image below), we can see that the popularity of these two terms seems to have stabilized (if you expand the search to 2007 or earlier, you will see the earlier peak and also that Data Mining was hotter for a while). Click on the image to get to the actual result, with which you can interact directly. There are two very interesting insights from this search result:

1. Looking at the "Regional Interest" for these terms, we see that the #1 country searching for these terms is India! Hong Kong and Singapore are also in the top 5. A surge of interest in Asia!
2. Adding two similar terms that have the term Analytics, namely Business Analytics and Data Analytics, unveils a growing interest in Analytics (whereas the two non-analytics terms have stabilized after their peak).

What to make of this? First, it means Analytics is hot. Business Analytics and Data Analytics encompass methods for analyzing data that add value to a business or any other organization. Analytics includes a wide range of data analysis methods, from visual analytics to descriptive and explanatory modeling, and predictive analytics. From statistical modeling, to interactive visualization (like the one shown here!), to machine-learning algorithms and more. Companies and organizations are hungry for methods that can turn their huge and growing amounts of data into actionable knowledge. And the hunger is most pressing in Asia.

Click on the image to refresh the Google Insight for Search result (in a new window)

The Riverplot: Visualizing distributions over time

The boxplot is one of the neatest visualizations for examining the distribution of values, or for comparing distribtions. It is more compact than a histogram in that it only presents the median, the two quartiles, the range of the data, and outliers. It also requires less user input than a histogram (where the user usually has to determine the number of bins). I view the boxplot and histogram as complements, and examining both is good practice.

But how can you visualize a distribution of values over time? Well, a series of boxplots often does the trick. But if the frequency is very high (e.g., ticker data) and the time scale of interest can be considered continuous, then an alternative is the River Plot. This is a visualization that we developed together with our colleagues at the Human Computer Interaction Lab on campus. It is essentiall a "continuous boxplot" that displays the median and quartiles (and potentially the range or other statistics). It is suitable when you have multiple time series that can be considered replicates (e.g., bid in multiple eBay auctions for an iPhone). We implemented it in the interactive time series visualization tool called Time Searcher, which allows to visualize and interactively explore a large set of time series with attributes.

Time Searcher is a powerful tool and allows the user to search for patterns, filter, and also to forecast an ongoing time series from its past and a historic database of similar time series. But then the Starbucks effect of too many choices kicks in. Together with our colleague Paolo Buono from Universita de Bari, Italy, we added the feature of "simultaneous previews": the user can choose multiple different parameter setting and view the resulting forecasts simultaneously. This was presented in the most recent InfoVis conference (Similarity-Based Forecasting with Simultaneous Previews: A River Plot Interface for Time Series Forecasting).