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Category: Visualization

Radar Charts

Published 2016-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his custom visuals course:

In this module you will learn how to use the Radar Chart, a Power BI Custom Visual. The Radar Chart is sometimes is also know to some as a web chart, spider chart, or star chart.  Using the Radar Chart allows you to display multiple categories of data on each spoke (like spokes on a bicycle wheel) of the chart. The Radar Chart does support the display of multiple metrics, which allows you to compare and contrast the “pull” that each category has on your metrics.

I still say you should stick with the fish chart for all of your visualization needs.

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Hexbin Scatterplot

Published 2016-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight continues his Power BI visuals series:

In this module you will learn how to use the Hexbin Scatterplot Power BI Custom Visual.  The Hexbin Scatterplot is a variation of the traditional Scatter Chart but instead of using bubble size it relies on color saturation and hexbins to show value distribution.  You should consider using this chart when you’re more interested in visualizing density instead of individuals points themselves.

This is worth checking out.

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Qlik Sold For $3 Billion

Published 2016-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Alex Woodie reports that Qlik Technologies has been acquired by a private equity firm:

After loading data into a server-based associative, in-memory database, Qlik customers could explore the data in a variety of ways from an AJAX Web GUI, enabling them to create and publish all sorts of reports and dashboards. The approach is not entirely dissimilar to the one taken by its rival, Tableau Software, which has also benefited from the big data boom and the democratization of BI.

The combination of market forces and a keen eye for product development were propellant for growth at Qlik. In 2009, the Radnor, Pennsylvania-based company had 11,400 customers and $157 million in revenues. By 2010, it had grown to 13,000 customers and had an IPO. By 2015, the company boasted 37,000 customers, $612 million in revenue, and a market cap north of $2.8 billion.

Qlik is definitely one of the big players in the visualization market, which includes Tableau, and Power BI/SSRS in Gartner’s Leaders quadrant and a bunch of competitors nipping at their heels.

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San Francisco Crime Analysis

Published 2016-06-07 by Kevin Feasel

Vimal Natarajan shows off some R charts using crime incident data:

By analyzing the plot above, we can arrive at the following insights:

  • The number of crimes steadily decline from midnight and are at the lowest during the early morning hours and then they start increasing and peak around 6 PM in the evening. This is the same insight we arrived in my previous analysis but here we have categorized by the Police district and still see the same pattern.

  • As seen in the previous plot, Park and Richmond districts have the lowest number of crimes throughout the day.

  • As highlighted in red in the plot above, the maximum number of crimes happens in Southern district around 6 PM in the evening.

I would prefer to see code here, but it does serve to give you an idea of what R can do.

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Flood Visualization

Published 2016-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith points out an animated flood chart using R:

As more settlements in Texas and France are impacted by severe flooding, this is a good time to thank the hydrologists at the NOAA who forecast river level rises in advance and give residents in affected areas time to move to higher ground. Along with topgraphic, rainfall, and weather data, monitoring stations maintained by NOAA and the USGS along rivers provide critical real-time information about river levels. NOAA scientists access this data using the dataRetrieval package for R, which they then incorporate into flood prediction models and use to generate animations like this one of the flood of the Delaware in February this year

Looks like I’ve got a new blog to follow…

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R: Using Images As Labels

Published 2016-06-06 by Kevin Feasel

Jonathan Carroll shows how to use images as labels in R:

There are probably very few cases for which this is technically a good idea (trying to be a featured author on JunkCharts might very well be one of those reasons). Nonetheless, there are at least a couple of requests for this floating around on stackoverflow; here and here for example. I struggled to find any satisfactory solutions that were in current working order (though perhaps my Google-fu has failed me).

Jonathan is rather against this idea, and it does seem like the answer is a hack.  I suppose the real answer is “sometimes an image isn’t worth a thousand words.”

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Retention Analytics

Published 2016-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc shows collegiate retention data using Power BI:

Partnering with Stetson University, I am happy to share the first of many Power BI Higher Education Analytics solutions. This solution shows student persistence, retention, and graduation patterns, leveraging BANNER as the data source. Year-over-over retention and graduation rates can be filtered to allow deeper examination of trends at the college and major level. Additional views, including retention and graduation rate tables by major and ethnicity, are included within the report solution.  The entire solution with documentation can be downloaded here.

The following image shows the first view within the report: overall persistence, retention, and graduation rates by year of first time student cohort. This report allows users to quickly show institutional retention and graduation trends across time, with the option to filter the view to show only specific colleges and/or majors.

This also serves as a Power BI demo, in case you’re hurting for good examples.

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Power BI Custom Visuals Course

Published 2016-06-02 by Kevin Feasel

Devin Knight is starting a free course on custom visuals in Power BI:

Welcome to an exciting new FREE class that I am launching today!  Over the next year (that’s right year!) I will be releasing one module a week detailing how to work with all of the Power BI visuals available in the Custom Visuals Gallery.  You might ask why am I doing this?  Well The Microsoft Power BI team and the Power BI Community, through the Custom Visuals Gallery, have expanded the data visualization capabilities of Power BI drastically but unfortunately has provided little and in some cases no direction on how to use these the new features.  These Custom Visuals are designed by Microsoft on occasion but more often then not the Power BI Community has put in a lot of hard work to provide these great new features for everyone to use.  My thought is if the Power BI Community is willing to design and publish these without asking individuals for payment then I would love to provide training on these features to you for free as well.

This sounds like a nice course.  Good on Devin for doing this.

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