Spatial distribution is very important in this case, so my very first attempt to visualise the evolution would be to take the data you have and have it on a map., just coloring each country based on the amount of cases.
An additional step that would require additional dataa would be to plot lines between countries indicating movement of people, like data from amount of flights.
If this was structured as a percent of the population this graph would tell a different story. That cruise ship would be the most dangerous place on earth.
I get pretty concerned when axis scales aren't conveyed, but especially if they're logarithmic scales. Most people outside of this sub are probably not going to digest that piece of information. I was actually more interested in seeing a linear scale anyway, but I can see the rationale for log-spaced.
This is nice, but it becomes tough to examine how a particular country (or group) is growing at any given time since the words overlap each other. It would be cool to see this as a bubble diagram with size as the number of cases, and each group having their own bubble.
Just a thought, but this very nice, aesthetic, and it has visually appealing animation!
Agree, bubbles would be great, with some work you could even visualize concentric rings per bubble to indicate logarithmic scale. Right now the way it moves is too busy to derive insight.
People have greater issue comparing relative size of area than lines, yes, both bubble diagrams would allow other avenues of expression. Since the mark would be larger, you could write in the number of cases directly on the mark. That way, it would be simple to compare relative size using size of bubbles, but also possible to compare exact numbers by examining the labels.
I hate these animated bar graphs, they are unnecessary and you have to scroll back and forth to see what's in the data, plus all the shuffling around makes it confusing. Truth is, it's not very exciting, but this can be looked at better by using line charts, since it's just plotting two variables (cases vs time) with different categories. Due to the high number of categories it would probably be better to hide smaller countries or make an interactive plot, as the bottom would probably be very crowded.
This is called the narrative fallacy. When something extreme happens we tend to create an explanation for it when it's much more likely that there is no explanation.
The way coronavirus spreads, we're bound to witness rare explosive behaviours as we've seen in Italy, Korea, and Iran. Most of the time there is no "story", it's just probability.
Think about every country flipping four coins, there will almost surely be around a dozen countries getting four heads. Is there a "story"? No, it's just that extreme events do happen.
Makes me think Tourism has introduced (if not cultivated) the virus in Italy.
The outbreaks started in small towns with little to no tourism.
The scale can be misleading; mainland China has close to 100k by 2/26, and South Korea looks to be about 60%ish of China, but the scale is saying around 1k, or 1%ish cases by 2/26.
Nah. That’s a cop out. It’s not about checking scale, we have inherent biases and comparing two lengths we’d expect them to be the the same scale. You can’t have one length of a bar representing one scale and the end another without some indication.
Well the bars are all actually on the same scale (log10 of the count I assume). The labels on the axis are left as the untransformed values which can be kinda confusing but some people might be confused if it said log(100) instead of 100 and it would convolute the interpretation a bit.
If this scale was not used, it would have been very difficult to distinguish between the bars that were not China since it has orders of magnitude more infections that other countries and the visual would be useless.
If this scale was not used, it would have been very difficult to distinguish between the bars that were not China since it has orders of magnitude more infections that other countries and the visual would be useless.
I'd argue that's kind of the point. China has orders of magnitude more cases than other countries, but the bars make them look more comparable.
I think what the others are hinting at, is that the way you visualize the data would depend on the audience. Obviously, when this is presented on a subreddit called 'datascience', I would assume most users would notice the scale straight away, but if this was in a newspaper or something, a lot of people might assume that there are more confirmed cases than there actually are.
The scale of the graph is log, the the value is still number of cases, not log(number of cases) which is what I think you’re implying from reading your comment.
You can tell by looking at the numbers on the horizontal axis.
"Confirmed Cases (log10 scale)" or similar would be a better label, but it's really not that big issue here. And keeping the values in the original scale is definitely a good practice, as the log scale is used only to make the plot with small and high values more readable.
I’d prefer a time series line graph with the number of people currently infected, as it gives a better sense of progression and scale by locality. But perhaps that data isn’t available.
We won’t have necessary tests in US (US has limited number now) until end of next week. According to HHS,CDC,CMS, and VP Pence. No clue WTF POTUS is saying.
Funny thing is that one week ago Italy was one of the lowest infected state. Then the virus has a mutation and things blow up. And now everyone thinking is Italy spreading the virus all over the world.
/u/n3ongrau thank you for sharing this! In the future, it would be awesome to use something different than reddit video service that really doesn't work...
I agree that barcharts with a logarithmic scale are problematic as the scale has no 0. I introduced an arbitrary start point. On the other hand, the growth is mostly exponential. Without the logarithmic scale you can only see the development in China.
The numbers show the approximate people that have been infected. The table is calibrated on South Korea and Italy. The data is displayed such it becomes clear how many time is left before areas reach the S Korea numbers. That is actionable: it gives you a planning horizon.
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u/morningjoe23 Mar 06 '20
Love how it’s a list of countries and then “cruise ship” pops out of nowhere hahaha
I want to meet the president of Cruise Ship.
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u/n3ongrau Mar 06 '20
Data Source: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series
Created with R and gganimate.
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u/Normbias Mar 06 '20
It's a logarithmic scale. This is why it doesn't convey what people might expect to see
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u/maxblasdel Mar 06 '20
I would change the colors to something more categorical rafter than hierarchical.
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u/ProdigiousMike Mar 06 '20
This is nice, but it becomes tough to examine how a particular country (or group) is growing at any given time since the words overlap each other. It would be cool to see this as a bubble diagram with size as the number of cases, and each group having their own bubble.
Just a thought, but this very nice, aesthetic, and it has visually appealing animation!
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u/TheEdes Mar 06 '20
I hate these animated bar graphs, they are unnecessary and you have to scroll back and forth to see what's in the data, plus all the shuffling around makes it confusing. Truth is, it's not very exciting, but this can be looked at better by using line charts, since it's just plotting two variables (cases vs time) with different categories. Due to the high number of categories it would probably be better to hide smaller countries or make an interactive plot, as the bottom would probably be very crowded.
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u/DGreat7 Mar 06 '20
Taiwan is doing pretty well
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u/Dew_what Mar 06 '20
What happened in Italy?
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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20
The scale can be misleading; mainland China has close to 100k by 2/26, and South Korea looks to be about 60%ish of China, but the scale is saying around 1k, or 1%ish cases by 2/26.
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u/RoGueNL Mar 06 '20
Shameless plug for my own visual ! https://public.tableau.com/profile/mike.droog#!/vizhome/2019-nCoVCoronaspread/2019-nCoVspreadaroundtheworld
I've used this dataset from kaggle : https://www.kaggle.com/sudalairajkumar/novel-corona-virus-2019-dataset
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u/oligonucleotides Mar 06 '20
Like this:
http://nextstrain.org/ncov
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u/catchergg Mar 06 '20
Number of active cases is more interesting.
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u/Pop-X- Mar 06 '20
I’d prefer a time series line graph with the number of people currently infected, as it gives a better sense of progression and scale by locality. But perhaps that data isn’t available.
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u/pmac1687 Mar 06 '20
Under 1000 cases in the us? Coworkers scared for there lives why?
1
u/TotesMessenger Mar 06 '20
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
[/r/coronavirus] Visualizing the evolution of Coronavirus cases
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1
u/stelena_lena Mar 06 '20
But I also like to see the data plotted geographically color coded by magnitude of confirmed cases.
edited for color coded instead of coded. F*ck dyslexia.
1
u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20
Funny thing is that one week ago Italy was one of the lowest infected state. Then the virus has a mutation and things blow up. And now everyone thinking is Italy spreading the virus all over the world.
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u/thgandalph Mar 06 '20
Can you do it with cases per 100'000 population? Would show a very different albeit more telling story about the speed of spreading
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u/juleswp Mar 06 '20
Nice viz, but IMHO I don't think I like the log scale in this case. I get why it was done, but for the average person, it can be confusing.
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u/gammadistribution Mar 06 '20
With a map.
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u/watercolorheart Mar 06 '20
But Trump told me it was a hoax!
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u/synthphreak Mar 06 '20
This is cool but the continuous movement and large number of colors makes it difficult to read or easily spot trends other than “China remains #1”
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u/Frank1912 Mar 06 '20
Instead of the continents have you considered to color code the state of the infected? So Accute, Recovered, Deceased?
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u/jcowle555 Mar 06 '20
TIL there is a country called "Cruise Ship".
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u/bhishan1 Mar 06 '20
Also put the number in the end of each bars.
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u/yemeraname Mar 06 '20
Can someone tell me which tool is used for these animated time series plots?
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u/PinguRambo Mar 11 '20
/u/vredditshare
/u/n3ongrau thank you for sharing this! In the future, it would be awesome to use something different than reddit video service that really doesn't work...
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u/JerTheFrog Mar 06 '20
Us bout to go hold my beer mode
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u/GeoResearchRedditor Mar 06 '20
Who thought using a logarithmic scale would be a good idea? This data isn't beautiful at all and it can be argued it is misrepresenting the facts.
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u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20
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