Data visualization

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. Since that time, murder rates in some cities have spiked. Our current President has extrapolated a society in chaos from that spike. Indeed, we’re tempted to draw the conclusion that the Ferguson killing caused the spike in murder rates. While proving a causal relationship can […]

Yesterday I ran a half marathon in Bend, Oregon, so I’m going to keep it a little lighter. I trained a lot using this excellent free program from Hal Higdon. Because the results were posted in a nice simple table, I thought I’d do a few visualizations to see how well I did in addition to […]

In a previous post I looked at price-to-rent ratios in major markets. Like a PE ratio for stocks, price-to-rent ratio is a decent benchmark for judging whether housing markets are over or undervalued. There are caveats to this, of course, including prevailing mortgage rates, real estate taxes, income tax giveaways, etc. But for it’s simplicity, I […]

I don’t like to define myself as liberal or conservative. On some issues I’m very liberal: social issues like gay marriage and abortion. On some issues I’m conservative: simplifying the tax code, cutting corporate tax rates, eliminating foreign earnings taxes. On some issues I’m libertarian: legalize marijuana (and other drugs, for that matter). And on […]

I wrote a couple posts on Chicago crime: 13 data narratives and Chicago crime by hour. But the data are so interesting that I wanted to dig deeper into the seasonality of Chicago crime. Before I was using trendlines to show this, but by switching to a color-box like below, we can more easily compare […]

A comment on my blog from spreadsheetjournalism suggested that looking at Chicago crime data in Excel might yield more insights because you could better see crime by hour. This is certainly possible in Tableau, and the visuals will bring quicker insight in rapid-fire succession when compared to an Excel pivot table. Before delving into the data, I suspect […]

I recently downloaded a Chicago crime data set at 1.2 gigabytes and around 5.75 million rows of data (1 for every crime committed since January 2001). First of all, kudos to the City of Chicago for making this data public. More kudos to Tableau for designing a product that makes it possible to quickly visualize […]

We hear a lot about failed states, and we wonder what we as Americans should do. Sometimes the threat of a failed state goads us to intervene abroad to protect our interests. That might mean American business interests, it could mean preventing the setup of terrorist safe havens, or maybe we just want to give […]

In my initial article on house-price-to-rent ratios, I looked at how major US markets compared to each other in terms of one of my favorite real estate value metrics – price / rent (using Zillow’s ZHVI / ZRI as a standin). In part II, I examined recent trends by region for that same metric. Now I […]

I recently came across a fascinating data set – the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) Provider Summary for the top 100 diagnoses. The name is quite a mouthful, as is the data on charges at 3,332 hospitals for the top 100 diagnoses. Unfortunately with so many attributes, it’s hard to spot a good story. First I’ll […]