this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2024
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Data is Beautiful

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▶️ Total olympic medals won in Paris 2024 and Human Development Index 🏅 (cdn.masto.host)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/dataisbeautiful
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

▶️ Total olympic medals won in Paris 2024 and Human Development Index 🏅

@dataisbeautiful

➡️ https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/what-olympic-medal-table-really-tells-us

After reading the article we made this #boxplot using #LabPlot, an open source data analysis and visualization software.

The plot doesn't provide answers, it rather invites some thinking.

#Olympics #Olympics2024 #France #China #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedKingdom #UK #Brazil #Australia #Japan #Italy #Canada #Germany #Italy #Netherlands #DataAnalysis #DataScience #OpenSource #FOSS

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is not beautiful, this is confusing.
Why are the Nederlands with a index of 10 more ro the right than Australia that happens to have an index of 10 as well?
The "information" of the x-axis is completely random or so it seems.
If you plotted medals (y-axis) over index (x-axis) there might be information in there.
Bit this? C'mon, thats embarrassing.

[–] clutchtwopointzero 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

"doesn't provides answers but invites thinking"... Nope. Doesn't even help that as the X-Axis is unlabelled

[–] [email protected] -5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

@clutchtwopointzero

A boxplot is a 1-dimensional plot. The data points are jittered along the x-axis to make them less crowded.

More on boxplots here:

➡️ https://labplot.kde.org/2021/08/11/box-plot/
➡️ https://userbase.kde.org/LabPlot/2DPlotting/BoxPlot

[–] clutchtwopointzero 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yeah, not a good way to visualize as the relationship between medal count and HDI is not obvious as only outliers get highlighted and the lack of information on other countries actually invite doubt as to the story that the plot is trying to tell (for example, Singapore and Hong Kong have extremely high HDI but the sheer smallness of their population is a factor against a higher medal count). There's nothing wrong with a traditional 2D scatter plot and axis-related box plots plotted against each axis separately

[–] WhatAmLemmy 2 points 2 months ago

This viz is shit because nobody can understand it.

1 dimensional visualizations are fucking stupid. The whole point of data viz is to simplify complex information; not make simple info complex.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A boxplot is a visualization tool to quickly get an idea of how the data is distributed. In this population the outliers are so large that the info the real box + whiskers give is very low.

In your title you suggest investigating a relationship between total Olympic medals and HDI - why not choose a scatter plot here?

That the number in square brackets refers to the HDI rank only get's clear on the second look.

The outliers being distributed over the X-Axis is confusing.

Sorry but this visualization is not beautiful, rather the wrong method used that cannot display the hypothesis stated in the title.

[–] clutchtwopointzero 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The choice of only highlighting the HDI of the outliers makes one wonder what the rest of the data is hiding and whether this graph is hiding the truth from the data to tell a biased narrative.

Also, box plots only work on a single dimension.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@LabPlot @dataisbeautiful
Doesn’t make sense unless you calculate in population size. Best way to do this is to have “# medals per capita ratio” on the vertical axis instead of simply # medals.

[–] stupidcasey 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This doesn’t make any sense at all, it’s trying to force correlation to be causation as some political agenda that I can’t quite understand.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

@stupidcasey Ok, let me explain: if you look at the chart it looks like the US is doing much much better than Australia. Twice the # of medals and about same score on human development index. Truth is US has over 12x the population of Australia.
If you adjust per my suggestion you’d see that Australia is doing ~6x better than US instead of US doing ~2x better than Australia as it is in the chart now. Much more realistic, isn’t it?

[–] stupidcasey 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

IM hearing a lot of correlation and not A whole lot of causation there, did the US have 12x the people competing in the Olympics?, did Australia pick its people from an even distribution of its populous or maybe just maybe did they Cherry pick from places that are better than the US like Sydney or Melbourne?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@stupidcasey
if a country has 12x a pool of people to pick their best athletes from, wouldn’t you agree that would hugely increase their winning chances?
If two schools compete in a chess match, 1 school has 100 students, the other 1200 students, and they both send their best chess player, with all other factors being equal, who would you put your money on?

[–] stupidcasey 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nope, I think both countries have more people than it would be possible to evaluate, also that’s population not living standards, also training has more to do with it than the individual initially picked also the amount of money it takes to train an athlete is such a small percentage of either country’s GDP that money just doesn’t matter either,

All that together plus the plethora of other variables makes this correlation not causation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@stupidcasey @stupidcasey so you really seriously think based on that above chart that US and then China are the ‘best performing’ countries and the fact that they have a huge population has nothing to do with it????

[–] stupidcasey 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

No I don’t, that chart is the human development index. Why would I draw a conclusion about population from a chart about human development index? They have nothing in common.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@stupidcasey I like have conversations, but don’t appreciate your tone of voice. That’s why I’ll block you. This is not Twitter.

[–] stupidcasey 1 points 2 months ago

M k, by👋👋👋

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

@stupidcasey And what all of this has to do with any political agenda; beats me! 🤣🤣🤣

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

@dataisbeautiful

Thank you for all your comments. A jittering of data points along the x-axis was used to avoid over-plotting. But yes, a scatter plot with a boxplot attached along the y-axis (to show outliers) may be more informative in this case.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

OP has tagged Canada but it’s not shown in the plot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Please for gods sake use per capita