Re: st: Re: Odds ratio graph - selecting order of bars

[David Hoaglin <dchoaglin@gmail.com>]

Hi, Mike.

Nick Cox has suggested a good way to learn about Stata graphics.  The
tools are impressive, and I continue to be surprised at the displays
that creative and skillful users have developed.

Clever programming, however, does not necessarily produce effective
displays.  Work on statistical graphics has a substantial literature
and has led to a good understanding (supported by empirical studies)
of which techniques are effective and which are not.  I won't try to
give a bibliography, but Ed Tufte's four books (starting with his 1983
one) and Cleveland (1985) are good places to start.  Howard Wainer has
written a stream of interesting books (e.g., 2009), and he has a
column in CHANCE magazine.

Nick commented that my comments about poor graphical displays on that
site were not specific. When I wrote that comment, I did not have time
to go into detail.  But also, after scrolling through that site, I did
not know where to start.  Many of its examples illustrate clever
programming and poor displays (though one could put the programming to
good use).  For example, I noticed a variety of stacked and divided
bar charts.  Because of its shortcomings that type of display should
generally be avoided.  (A key shortcoming of stacked bar graphs is
that categories other than the bottom one are made difficult to
compare among groups by not having a common baseline.)  The book by
Naomi Robbins (2005) gives further explanation and examples of better
displays.

My advice: Choose graphs that are effective for displaying the type of
data you have, and then learn how to program them in Stata.  If
someone hasn't already created the graph you need, Stata probably has
the tools to do it.  If everyone in your field uses a particular type
of graph, don't assume that that graph is effective.  Old habits die
hard.  For example, bars are heavily overused, and some journals
contain many figures that use "dynamite-plunger plots" (discussed by
Freeman et al. 2008 in the chapter How to Display Data Badly).

David Hoaglin


Cleveland, William S. (1985).  The Elements of Graphing Data.
Monterey, CA: Wadsworth.

Freeman, Jenny V., Walters, Stephen J., and Campbell, Michael J.
(2008).  How to Display Data.  BMJ Books.

Robbins, Naomi B. (2005).  Creating More Effective Graphs.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Tufte, Edward (1983).  The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
 Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press (2nd ed, 2001).

Wainer, Howard (2009).  Picturing the Uncertain World: How to
Understand, Communicate, and Control Uncertainty through Graphical
Display.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

David Hoaglin

On Tue, Jul 9, 2013 at 8:18 PM, Michael Stewart
<michaelstewartresearch@gmail.com> wrote:
> HI ,
> Would David/Nick or any statalist members recommend sources to learn
> stata graphics , especially involving some programming like in
> http://www.survey-design.com.au/Stata%20Graphs.html
> Thanks
> Mike
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