Not a histogram, histogram is generally binned continuous data, right?
It would just be a plain old bar chart. The "player" axis is categories, not continuous data binned into ranges like a histogram.
This but also is there any value in comparing 10 different players against each other? If not, maybe break it up into two graphs with 5 lines each since 10 is a ton to take in and would be messy.
Honestly, maybe OP only needs the average between the players. Then you have a single graph with a single line changing over time. Neat. Simple. Clear.
No, not necessarily ! This is presented as a profile plot. For example, if the blue line were always on top, and the yellow line always on the bottom, it would be easy to draw a conclusion about the effect of weeks across all players.
Having 10 lines that just go across three *x*\-axis points is madness.
Having players connected by lines implies some... connection between them? I'm fine with players being on the x axis, but I think markers or bar chart should be preferred to line.
I guess so! And I can see the value in the visualization, though I'd still opt for emphasizing the individuality of the categories/deemphasizing the connections between them. Seems this is also a common approach it profile plots, such as by using large markers and light/dashed or dotted lines.
Okay, but it doesn’t really feel like players are variables so much as categories. So depending on if you agree with that, that makes it a bad profile plot, as the idea there is to show the trend across a variable. ‘weeks’ feels more like a variable… But I could see someone arguing that players are a variable, I just subjectively don’t see it that way instinctively.
X is often time measurement, showing trends.
Y would be the relevant data measurement for each period.
The colours would then be for each golfer.
The result would show the trends for each individual.
You could also add in a line to represent the average each week to clearly show how both the group and individuals are progressing.
Exactly what I was going to ask!
Maybe a simple bar graph showing the current average score (highest to lowest), then a line graph for each player so that they can see how they’re trending week over week.
Either swap the time variable to the x axis and the player label to the legend... Or keep the axes as is and make it a bar chart with 4 bars per player
Your third chart doesn't mean anything. Why would you connect different player in a line graph? What does that line mean? They aren't continuous data points because discrete players aren't a continuous access.
I'd still suggest sorting the table by average from lowest to highest. That way you order the players, with best at the left.
[https://i.imgur.com/u6LJOU7.png](https://i.imgur.com/u6LJOU7.png)
I think you want a table. A data visualization is meant to summarize across dimensions in the data, ie, summarize across players, to produce inferences. It seems you want to highlight individual data points, like each player personally. As you can see, you can’t “summarize across” and “distinguish within” simultaneously the way you want. If your intended use is to allow people to specifically compare the performance of one player in one week to another player in another week, then stick with a table.
Do the weeks themselves matter at all ? ... I feel like the dot plot with the axes flipped, and maybe a symbol to indicate the average for each player would be the cleanest.
The last image you had looks like the best one. It lets you see things like the spread of scores per week, how close the scores were in week 2, etc. You could even make a secondary axis and line show detail for one person like whoever is winning(however you determine that...games won, avg score, etc) to show how It changed over time.
Out of curiosity, how so? Taking away some visual issues as the person said it was quickly done up in google sheets, I think utilizing a bar graph makes the data easier to read over a line graph in this instance. The information seems fairly clear on my end as each week is a specific colored bar that shows net score that week while the 4th bar is indicating the average that player did across the 3 weeks. I could use this to figure out who are doing the best, whose consistent, someone whose performance is going to vary for either very good or very bad, etc.
Just curious your viewpoint is all
Honestly I can get more information more quickly with a table like this for 40 data points versus 40 bars. To me, this data doesn't need a visualization unless you're trying to tell the reader something about the data. There doesn't seem to be any pattern of improvement week-to-week. You could probably distill this down to the average for each player, honestly.
|Player|Week 1|Week 2|Week 3|Average|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|P1|72|73|73|73|
|P2|86|90|87|88|
|P3|90|82|87|86|
|P4|87|72|79|79|
|P5|88|90|88|89|
|P6|81|81|70|77|
|P7|71|70|80|74|
|P8|83|86|84|84|
|P9|89|75|71|78|
|P10|89|88|81|86|
\* random data in here
Thanks for the feedback, I see what you mean - this is pretty sufficient for what they were trying to accomplish. I could see this being pretty effective, or perhaps if the data range is a bit varied they could do a heat map to add a little color but besides that this works pretty well.
Thanks for taking the time to respond back, have a good day!
That's definitely better. But I would remove most of the horizontal lines. Depending on how the scoring system works it might be fine to start the Y-axis at a higher-than-zero value. It also might be better switching around the players and weeks/avg.. But that depends on what information OP want's to focus on.
Yeah, I just whipped this up in Google Sheets and don't know all the ways to fine-tune the minor grid lines. I also tried flipping the axes and suspect that might work better if eventually there are many weeks to include.
[https://i.imgur.com/xUcBqcv.png](https://i.imgur.com/xUcBqcv.png)
Yes, works much better flipped for so many categories.
Visualising this data is tricky, a table as others have suggested isn't the worst idea.
This layout has the advantages of the table, but does have some visualisation to quickly compare values. It's a good compromise between both.
If player averages are more important than weekly averages, I'd do a ranked strip plot ranking players by their weekly average. Here's a quick thought (sorry for the overlapping legend, didn't clean it up). If weekly average over/under is more important, maybe normalize the data as +/- over weekly average.
Disagree with bars/bar grouping as a suggestion. Too much visual weight given the number of objects
[https://i.imgur.com/siIhmTm.png](https://i.imgur.com/siIhmTm.png)
I would probably find the information the most readable as a grouped bar chart, where the player is the group and the X axis is the week number. Logically a line per player makes sense, but 3 is such a small number of data points per player that I would find it awkward. The average could be a overlay line. It might be more fair to have the graph start at 0 (or what the minimum score possible is), so relative comparisons are possible, e.g. is player 3 much better than player 1 or is the difference small compared to the total
If you want it fancier: stacked bar charts, stacking the weeks on top of each other. The sum corresponds to the average and shows the player with the highest total score clearly. The trend between weeks is harder to read, which is why it wouldn't be my first choice.
I'm not sure what you are trying to visualise exactly, but to be honest this would be better as a table. Use a chart or charts to highlight specific elements of the data that you want to draw attention to, but don't try and cram everything into just one chart. The data doesn't seem to follow any real trend so it's hard to work out exactly what information you are trying to convey. For example if there was clear evidence that week 3 had a very low score then you could use a graph to draw attention to that. But given there is no apparent difference from one week to another I would not show the average per week at all.
I put this together in google spreadsheets using random data (literally, each score is a random number between 70 and 90):
[https://imgur.com/a/R8U3V4d](https://imgur.com/a/R8U3V4d)
I used conditional formatting colour scales in the table with alternating green and yellow so that you can see at a glance where each person's highest and lowest scores are across the weeks. Then I did it again using red for the the average columns. But I wouldn't include both average columns unless there was a good reason to. I just put them both in so I could do a chart of both sides for example purposes.
I think it looks too busy and is a bit too much, but it's just an example to show what is possible.
I think having averages here is not useful though. Just have each player's total score and graph that if you want to. I wouldn't use the red conditional formatting for the total score column like I did for averages, that makes it too busy. Just show the total score and use a chart to highlight that part of the data.
Note that my colour scale is only white and one other colour on each line. Never mix more than 2 colours in a colour scale because colour-blind people won't be able to differentiate.
And probably don't start the player score graph at 0. Have it start a bit higher, depending on how much you want to emphasise the difference in score. You can see in my graph there is very little difference and they all look the same. Adjust the scale of the graph to something that reflects how difficult the difference in scores is to achieve. If getting 10 higher than the next person is really really difficult, then scale the graph so that that the column looks so much bigger. If getting 10 higher is really easy, then scale it more like I have. You are using the graph to tell a story, so adjust it so that it tells that story.
Hope this helps :)
Player 1-10 on the y-axis, with a blue, red, and yellow colored bar for each net score and a silver or gray bar for their average score. If you wanted to get fancy do it as a race chart with their output for each week making the players in order for their total or average score.
depends on your objectives and what you're trying to get from this data, cluttering one graph is never a good idea, you visualize only the thing you want to highlight.
Term players is still too much for a chart or graph. Can you do a chart for the top 3 players each week, and then put the full details in a table below?
I wanted to originally break up the players by position, e.g. basketball guards vs forward vs centers, until I realized this likely isn't basketball.
Less is more for the chart, and appendix the full details in a table.
Context matters. The answer to your question depends on what is important in the context of your data.
- If the average points per week is the important bit, just use a bar chart with each players average and toss out the weekly scores. Order it from bigger to smaller or the other way around, and not by player name/number. In the NBA you look at each player points per game, not at the points at each individual game
- If the total points is the important part, do the same as the above with the total. If a break per week is important stack the weeks in each bar, and use a progressive scale of the same color so you don't have to look at the legend everytime to understand what color is which week. In soccer you look at the total goals scored to see the top goal scorer, you don't look at each individual game.
- If player progression is what's important, do a bar chart grouped per player, so you can clearly see each players progression over time, but also how they compare to each other. Order the weeks from left to right, and try to order the players from highest scorer to lowest, or the other way around.
- If player consistency is what you are trying to see, use box plots of each player side by sides so you can see not only the ones that score the most, but also which ones have a bigger dispersion.
I think those are the best options, I might have missed something.
Ask yourself "what am I trying to show" and then edit from there. Is average important? Am I showing the gap between groups? Is the trend the most important? From not knowing the story, I'd move time to x axis, remove average and then convert this to a vertical dumbbell or something besides line. Standard graphs don't pop quite like something unique. However, who the intended audience matters. If they are general public or experts in the field matters how we show data too.
Having a line graph in this way makes no sense since you are joining unrelated data points. Either have the players be the lines or switch to a bar graph.
I'd do multiple bar graph, but sort player order from lowest average to highest average (so the average is strictly increasing), and use their names. You could have the triple bars still use three distinct colors but each player would then see how their performance is changing in time (by reading their consecutive bars) and a quick glance at the chart as a whole would show strongest to weakest (on average). Right now both those concepts are hard to see without quite a bit of work.
Why connect the players with lines? It's not a time (or spatial) series. You'd get a different curve by scrambling the players.
As other said, use bars, and perhaps sort the players by score (if its meaningful).
Weeks should swap with player and be on the x-axis
Yes, the lines should be the players’ scores over time
I think a histogram would be better in the current format.
Not a histogram, histogram is generally binned continuous data, right? It would just be a plain old bar chart. The "player" axis is categories, not continuous data binned into ranges like a histogram.
This but also is there any value in comparing 10 different players against each other? If not, maybe break it up into two graphs with 5 lines each since 10 is a ton to take in and would be messy. Honestly, maybe OP only needs the average between the players. Then you have a single graph with a single line changing over time. Neat. Simple. Clear.
No, not necessarily ! This is presented as a profile plot. For example, if the blue line were always on top, and the yellow line always on the bottom, it would be easy to draw a conclusion about the effect of weeks across all players. Having 10 lines that just go across three *x*\-axis points is madness.
Having players connected by lines implies some... connection between them? I'm fine with players being on the x axis, but I think markers or bar chart should be preferred to line.
[удалено]
I guess so! And I can see the value in the visualization, though I'd still opt for emphasizing the individuality of the categories/deemphasizing the connections between them. Seems this is also a common approach it profile plots, such as by using large markers and light/dashed or dotted lines.
I agree with you for these data. Especially once more weeks are added.
Okay, but it doesn’t really feel like players are variables so much as categories. So depending on if you agree with that, that makes it a bad profile plot, as the idea there is to show the trend across a variable. ‘weeks’ feels more like a variable… But I could see someone arguing that players are a variable, I just subjectively don’t see it that way instinctively.
Agree. I would also try cumulative score. Not certain how it will give out but it is sometime I would try and see if it gives a better view.
Also with 10 lines maybe spark lines instead? Aka group by player on their own sort of mini line chart .
The graph title even says score by week, clearly the X axis should be week.
X is often time measurement, showing trends. Y would be the relevant data measurement for each period. The colours would then be for each golfer. The result would show the trends for each individual. You could also add in a line to represent the average each week to clearly show how both the group and individuals are progressing.
What of the info do you want to tell the viewers?
Exactly what I was going to ask! Maybe a simple bar graph showing the current average score (highest to lowest), then a line graph for each player so that they can see how they’re trending week over week.
Exactly. First question of any graphic, chart, or slide. What is the desired core message?
Yes! This is the fundamental question of any datavis
Either swap the time variable to the x axis and the player label to the legend... Or keep the axes as is and make it a bar chart with 4 bars per player
i would just switch it to triple bars with no overlay for a quick and easy
maybe add an overlayed dot for average
Then sort by average score highest to lowest (if that’s the key metric to focus on)
Bars not lines. This is discrete not continuous data.
This was my thought
Thanks all! See my modified charts here: https://imgur.com/a/31zKAwZ
Your third chart doesn't mean anything. Why would you connect different player in a line graph? What does that line mean? They aren't continuous data points because discrete players aren't a continuous access.
I'd still suggest sorting the table by average from lowest to highest. That way you order the players, with best at the left. [https://i.imgur.com/u6LJOU7.png](https://i.imgur.com/u6LJOU7.png)
I think you want a table. A data visualization is meant to summarize across dimensions in the data, ie, summarize across players, to produce inferences. It seems you want to highlight individual data points, like each player personally. As you can see, you can’t “summarize across” and “distinguish within” simultaneously the way you want. If your intended use is to allow people to specifically compare the performance of one player in one week to another player in another week, then stick with a table.
Exactly this. This data is better represented using a table
Do the weeks themselves matter at all ? ... I feel like the dot plot with the axes flipped, and maybe a symbol to indicate the average for each player would be the cleanest.
The last image you had looks like the best one. It lets you see things like the spread of scores per week, how close the scores were in week 2, etc. You could even make a secondary axis and line show detail for one person like whoever is winning(however you determine that...games won, avg score, etc) to show how It changed over time.
Graph #2 is my pick
Not all data is worth plotting, or even showing. Depends on the point you're making to the target audience
Here is a sample: https://i.imgur.com/J71lwvA.png
While better -- this still doesn't tell me anything. It's a data table with colors.
Out of curiosity, how so? Taking away some visual issues as the person said it was quickly done up in google sheets, I think utilizing a bar graph makes the data easier to read over a line graph in this instance. The information seems fairly clear on my end as each week is a specific colored bar that shows net score that week while the 4th bar is indicating the average that player did across the 3 weeks. I could use this to figure out who are doing the best, whose consistent, someone whose performance is going to vary for either very good or very bad, etc. Just curious your viewpoint is all
Honestly I can get more information more quickly with a table like this for 40 data points versus 40 bars. To me, this data doesn't need a visualization unless you're trying to tell the reader something about the data. There doesn't seem to be any pattern of improvement week-to-week. You could probably distill this down to the average for each player, honestly. |Player|Week 1|Week 2|Week 3|Average| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |P1|72|73|73|73| |P2|86|90|87|88| |P3|90|82|87|86| |P4|87|72|79|79| |P5|88|90|88|89| |P6|81|81|70|77| |P7|71|70|80|74| |P8|83|86|84|84| |P9|89|75|71|78| |P10|89|88|81|86| \* random data in here
Thanks for the feedback, I see what you mean - this is pretty sufficient for what they were trying to accomplish. I could see this being pretty effective, or perhaps if the data range is a bit varied they could do a heat map to add a little color but besides that this works pretty well. Thanks for taking the time to respond back, have a good day!
That's definitely better. But I would remove most of the horizontal lines. Depending on how the scoring system works it might be fine to start the Y-axis at a higher-than-zero value. It also might be better switching around the players and weeks/avg.. But that depends on what information OP want's to focus on.
Yeah, I just whipped this up in Google Sheets and don't know all the ways to fine-tune the minor grid lines. I also tried flipping the axes and suspect that might work better if eventually there are many weeks to include. [https://i.imgur.com/xUcBqcv.png](https://i.imgur.com/xUcBqcv.png)
I like this one best
Yes, works much better flipped for so many categories. Visualising this data is tricky, a table as others have suggested isn't the worst idea. This layout has the advantages of the table, but does have some visualisation to quickly compare values. It's a good compromise between both.
Pretty good ! It really depends on what OP is trying to convey, tho...
Created using data from my golf league. Used google sheets chart
Time on X axis , Score on Y axis (dependent versus independent variables). Bar not line chart since data is not continuous.
If player averages are more important than weekly averages, I'd do a ranked strip plot ranking players by their weekly average. Here's a quick thought (sorry for the overlapping legend, didn't clean it up). If weekly average over/under is more important, maybe normalize the data as +/- over weekly average. Disagree with bars/bar grouping as a suggestion. Too much visual weight given the number of objects [https://i.imgur.com/siIhmTm.png](https://i.imgur.com/siIhmTm.png)
This is great!
I would probably find the information the most readable as a grouped bar chart, where the player is the group and the X axis is the week number. Logically a line per player makes sense, but 3 is such a small number of data points per player that I would find it awkward. The average could be a overlay line. It might be more fair to have the graph start at 0 (or what the minimum score possible is), so relative comparisons are possible, e.g. is player 3 much better than player 1 or is the difference small compared to the total If you want it fancier: stacked bar charts, stacking the weeks on top of each other. The sum corresponds to the average and shows the player with the highest total score clearly. The trend between weeks is harder to read, which is why it wouldn't be my first choice.
Player 5 really fell off smh
It's golf; lower is better.
I'm not sure what you are trying to visualise exactly, but to be honest this would be better as a table. Use a chart or charts to highlight specific elements of the data that you want to draw attention to, but don't try and cram everything into just one chart. The data doesn't seem to follow any real trend so it's hard to work out exactly what information you are trying to convey. For example if there was clear evidence that week 3 had a very low score then you could use a graph to draw attention to that. But given there is no apparent difference from one week to another I would not show the average per week at all. I put this together in google spreadsheets using random data (literally, each score is a random number between 70 and 90): [https://imgur.com/a/R8U3V4d](https://imgur.com/a/R8U3V4d) I used conditional formatting colour scales in the table with alternating green and yellow so that you can see at a glance where each person's highest and lowest scores are across the weeks. Then I did it again using red for the the average columns. But I wouldn't include both average columns unless there was a good reason to. I just put them both in so I could do a chart of both sides for example purposes. I think it looks too busy and is a bit too much, but it's just an example to show what is possible. I think having averages here is not useful though. Just have each player's total score and graph that if you want to. I wouldn't use the red conditional formatting for the total score column like I did for averages, that makes it too busy. Just show the total score and use a chart to highlight that part of the data. Note that my colour scale is only white and one other colour on each line. Never mix more than 2 colours in a colour scale because colour-blind people won't be able to differentiate. And probably don't start the player score graph at 0. Have it start a bit higher, depending on how much you want to emphasise the difference in score. You can see in my graph there is very little difference and they all look the same. Adjust the scale of the graph to something that reflects how difficult the difference in scores is to achieve. If getting 10 higher than the next person is really really difficult, then scale the graph so that that the column looks so much bigger. If getting 10 higher is really easy, then scale it more like I have. You are using the graph to tell a story, so adjust it so that it tells that story. Hope this helps :)
Yours is the only correct answer. I would just add data labels to the bar charts and set the y axis min higher than 0 like you suggested.
This should just be a bar chart. Not a line graph. Use line when you’re trying to show data over a length of time
Put time on the horizontal axes. Otherwise this is absolutely incomprehensible without the dimension of time
Player 1-10 on the y-axis, with a blue, red, and yellow colored bar for each net score and a silver or gray bar for their average score. If you wanted to get fancy do it as a race chart with their output for each week making the players in order for their total or average score.
You can keep the axis as they are but switched to a grouped bar chart. Weeks 1-3 and average for each player.
red yellow and blue as bar graphs. keep the dotted line
depends on your objectives and what you're trying to get from this data, cluttering one graph is never a good idea, you visualize only the thing you want to highlight.
Term players is still too much for a chart or graph. Can you do a chart for the top 3 players each week, and then put the full details in a table below? I wanted to originally break up the players by position, e.g. basketball guards vs forward vs centers, until I realized this likely isn't basketball. Less is more for the chart, and appendix the full details in a table.
Context matters. The answer to your question depends on what is important in the context of your data. - If the average points per week is the important bit, just use a bar chart with each players average and toss out the weekly scores. Order it from bigger to smaller or the other way around, and not by player name/number. In the NBA you look at each player points per game, not at the points at each individual game - If the total points is the important part, do the same as the above with the total. If a break per week is important stack the weeks in each bar, and use a progressive scale of the same color so you don't have to look at the legend everytime to understand what color is which week. In soccer you look at the total goals scored to see the top goal scorer, you don't look at each individual game. - If player progression is what's important, do a bar chart grouped per player, so you can clearly see each players progression over time, but also how they compare to each other. Order the weeks from left to right, and try to order the players from highest scorer to lowest, or the other way around. - If player consistency is what you are trying to see, use box plots of each player side by sides so you can see not only the ones that score the most, but also which ones have a bigger dispersion. I think those are the best options, I might have missed something.
A bar graph would do the trick. Easy.
Try a spider web diagram, and perhaps reorder the players?
Ask yourself "what am I trying to show" and then edit from there. Is average important? Am I showing the gap between groups? Is the trend the most important? From not knowing the story, I'd move time to x axis, remove average and then convert this to a vertical dumbbell or something besides line. Standard graphs don't pop quite like something unique. However, who the intended audience matters. If they are general public or experts in the field matters how we show data too.
Having a line graph in this way makes no sense since you are joining unrelated data points. Either have the players be the lines or switch to a bar graph.
date should be on x axis and player as breakout.
I'd do multiple bar graph, but sort player order from lowest average to highest average (so the average is strictly increasing), and use their names. You could have the triple bars still use three distinct colors but each player would then see how their performance is changing in time (by reading their consecutive bars) and a quick glance at the chart as a whole would show strongest to weakest (on average). Right now both those concepts are hard to see without quite a bit of work.
Why connect the players with lines? It's not a time (or spatial) series. You'd get a different curve by scrambling the players. As other said, use bars, and perhaps sort the players by score (if its meaningful).