70  Summary of Types of Plots

The table overleaf lists some of the most common types of relationships you will have to visualize, along with the most appropriate geometries. We will begin our discussion of plotting quantitative data by looking at uni-variate distributions. Comparing distributions will be the topic of interest in bi- and multivariate data visualizations, where the relationship between different variables, in addition to their individual distributions, is of interest.

A summary of the different types of graphs described in this workshop:

Relationship Points Lines Bars Boxes Area Matrix
Distribution Strip charts Density plots Histograms Box plots Density plots
Categorical Comparisons Dot plots Parallel plots Bar charts Box plots Violin plots
Rank Comparison Bar charts Box plots
Time Series Time line, Regression lines
Parts-of-a-whole Pie charts, Stacked bar, Mosaic Plots
Correlation Scatter plots, Q-Q plots Regression lines 2D Density plots
Overlap between variables Venn diagrams
Subsets of a variable Euler diagrams
Multivariate summaries Heat maps, Correlation matrix, Scatter plot matrix