this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Data is Beautiful

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Has the #FertilityRate in the #EuropeanUnion been stable over the past two decades?

A simple #XmR chart available in @LabPlot [2.12dev] can be used to track the stability of any process.

Boosts appreciated! :boost_love:๐Ÿš€

โžก๏ธ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shewhart_individuals_control_chart

@europesays @dataisbeautiful @[email protected]

#Europe #Future #EU #Europa #Fertility #Politics #Healthcare #Health #BirthRate #Demography #Population #Biology #News #Community #Statistics #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #ControlChart #LabPlot #Data #dataViz

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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

not to be confused with the fertility rat, which has been very unstable over the last decade

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

@[email protected] @europesays @[email protected] @dataisbeautiful what about starting the y axis at 0 so you don't give the wrong impression that it's widely moving from year to year ?

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

@coucouf @europesays @[email protected] @dataisbeautiful

Let us reply by quoting Howard Wainer. In his well-known paper "How to Display Data Badly" he wrote:

"A second way to hide the data is in the scale. This corresponds to blowing up the scale (i.e., looking at the data from far away) so that any variation in the data is obscured by the magnitude of the scale. One can justify this practice by appealing to "honesty requires that we start the scale at zero," or other sorts of sophistry."

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@[email protected] @europesays @[email protected] @dataisbeautiful very nicely framed but unconvincing. I can reverse the argument and call it sophistry. Data visualisation inherently conveys a message and you can't avoid having to choose what you want to say. Besides most data has a confidence level so at some point by blindly applying this "principle" you're just showing noise.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

@coucouf @europesays @[email protected] @dataisbeautiful

Thank you for your comment. For these types of charts describing variation in data, which also include upper and lower limits on the values that contain probable noise, not using 0 at the start on the y-axis makes sense, as it makes it easier to analyze this variation and detection of potential signals.

We believe that Howard Wainer certainly would not recommend blindly applying this principle to all cases.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not starting at zero is a common practice in science and data processing. The difference between bad and good data visualization is in relevance. Good data visualization starts an axis at non-zero numbers because the fluctuation is more relevant than the zero. Bad data visualization hides relevant data to present an alternate takeaway.

Here, a change in birth rate of even 0.1 or 0.2 is a major societal change, and showing that change is more relevant than showing the zero (how would it even be possible that there were zero births in a year, anyways?)

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

@Contramuffin yes, agreed. And thank for the perspective on the birth rate.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

@[email protected] @kde @europesays @dataisbeautiful @[email protected] thats not ferility rate. Ferility rate is the number of pregnancies after trying 1 month. This is something completely different

[โ€“] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@hanscees @kde @europesays @dataisbeautiful @[email protected]

Thank you for your comment. We are just following the definition of the fertility rate by the World Bank Group:

๐Ÿ‘‰ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=EU

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

@[email protected] @kde @europesays @dataisbeautiful @[email protected] ok, apparently that is common use. I stand corrected.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Wikipedia defines it as:

The total fertility rate (TFR) of a population is the average number of children that are born to a woman over her lifetime.

Link

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Where it dips down coincides perfectly with the time I was in jail.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

@europesays @[email protected] @dataisbeautiful

Simply asking two primary questions to guide any analysis will lead to a better understanding of variation and more effective decision making:

1๏ธโƒฃ Is the process currently stable?
2๏ธโƒฃ Based on this knowledge, what type of action makes sense?

๐Ÿ‘‰ https://healthleadsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/understanding-variation26-years-later.pdf

In this paper Thomas Nolan, Rocco J. Perla and Lloyd Provost explain why correctly assessing #variation is fundamental to sound decisions.

#DecisionMaking #Politics #Data #Business #News