Error Awareness

Last updated on 2024-05-15 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • TODO

Objectives

  • Recognize common mistakes responsible for misleading plots or misinterpretations.
  • Evaluate a plot for areas of potential sources of confusion.
  • Suggest improvements to plots that clarify its points.

Mighty Challenge grik grak grok

Which questions would you say this visualization fails to answer?

  • are the data in each of the groups mutually exclusive?
  • are there outliers excluded? how?
  • how are the data combined to form each point & whisker plot?
  • how are the CIs (confidence intervals) computed? [in this case, because the quantitative axis is % increase, CI is a little funky here as an estimate of error around the value, and not an estimate of variability within a group]
  • are the number of subjects in each group equal (or approximately equal)?
  • is there a grouping of interventions that suggest generalizations? (e.g. 1 text vs 2 texts, content of reminder, format of reminder)
  • is there an effect of time of day that a reminder is sent/received (vs. relative to an appointment time)
  • how robust are the estimates to the selection of the regression model?
  • soooo, what’s the takeaway from this figure?