In our standard graphics, we usually present summary statistics only. The exception is the Kaplan-Meier plot showing also individual patients. Showing individual patients effectively tells us so much more about e.g. clusters, outliers, and extreme values.
Join Benjamin and I while we dive deep into the following points:
Why its important to:
- Show uncertainty
- Show actual number of patients
- Give a feeling for the evidence
- Connect to the physicians seeing the individual patients
- Increase transparency
How to create:
- Spaghetti plot
- Slope graph
- Using jittering for categorical data or thickness based on the number of patients
- Scatterplots
- Animations over time
- Heat maps
- Bar charts with symbols for the patients
- Kaplan-Meier
- Cumulative distribution function
- Waterfall plots
- Flowing data example of categorical data over time (find it here: https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-americans/)
Additional features:
- Highlight the group means
- Making it interactive with hover over or filters or selections
- Sorting is crucial
- Combination with charts displaying group differences
Solve problems:
- Unbalanced treatment groups
- Avoid over-cluttered graphs
- Time to read and explain complex graphs
- The time needed to create complex graphs
- Problems obscuring small but meaningful differences
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I want to help the community of statisticians, data scientists, programmers and other quantitative scientists to be more influential, innovative, and effective. I believe that as a community we can help our research, our regulatory and payer systems, and ultimately physicians and patients take better decisions based on better evidence.
I work to achieve a future in which everyone can access the right evidence in the right format at the right time to make sound decisions.
When my kids are sick, I want to have good evidence to discuss with the physician about the different therapy choices.
When my mother is sick, I want her to understand the evidence and being able to understand it.
When I get sick, I want to find evidence that I can trust and that helps me to have meaningful discussions with my healthcare professionals.
I want to live in a world, where the media reports correctly about medical evidence and in which society distinguishes between fake evidence and real evidence.
Let’s work together to achieve this.
