Pie Charts

Why Teach Pie Charts?

Today we are going to look at the business worlds favorite chart (and apparently statisticians least favorite). Personally, I think pie charts are a great and irreplaceable visualization for data science and visual analytics.

They have a few strong points:

1. Simple and easy to interpret

2. Easily gives the relative proportion of a categorical variable

3. It allows us to compare aggregated summaries of numeric data from different categories.

In short, their best strength is their readability.

Examples of Pie Charts

Seeing the relative proportions of a categorical variable’s levels is of course a staple of what the pie-chart is good at.

Note this shows the frequency directly, as an alternative we can also specify the percentage to be shown in most software. This shows regions of where a sample of lottery players hail from in a random casino.

The Pie-Chart is also very good for aggregated data like total stock price returns. Here is a “fake-data” example of a pie chart.

This lets us see which stock that we have the most and the least money invested into.

So, we hope this brief discussion helps convince some of the more reserved “quants” to maybe give the pie-chart a second try. Regardless, this is clearly the most business savvy visualization from basic statistics; it gets the point across very quickly, making it ideal for any kind of financial or business-related report.

Hope you liked this quick overview. Check out more of our content on our channel. Until then happy mining!

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