Statistical graphics

Rookie mistakes and how to fix them when making plots of data

In this assignment, the focus was to practice data cleaning. Students suggested questions to build a class survey, to get to know the interests of other class members, and then completed the composed survey. After cleaning the data, a few summary plots of interesting aspects of the data were made. There are some common mistakes that rookies often make when constructing data plots: packing too much into a single graphic, leaving categorical variables unordered, reversing norms for response and explanatory variables, conditioning in wrong order, plotting counts when proportions should be the focus, not normalizing by counts, using a boxplot for small sample size.