Lots of great presentations at the QDG Guru day in London last week.  Every talk gave me something to think about or explore futher.

Bruno Calver’s discussion of cohort / cell analysis (from his excellent white paper “Data Literacy –5 Practical Tips“)  and Patrik Lundblad’s discussion of multivariate analysis blended together (mashed up?) in my mind to inspire the example below.

The scatter chart below plots US agricultural commodity exports in year 2017.  Dimensions are Product and importing Country.   Taking a clue from Bruno’s talk,  I’ve concatenated Country & Product as the dimension to facilitate “cell analysis”.

X-axis is the absolute quantity in Metric Tons, Y-axis is the quantity normalized to population (thanks Patrik & Bruno) .

“Mexico-Corn” looks interesting. What should happen when I select the Mexico-Corn bubble?  Should the chart filter to show just that Country & Product?  Probably not, as that would be be a single bubble.

Regular readers of my blog know that I’m a fan of understanding user selections not as a filter, but rather a focus.

More likely I’m interested in exploring both Mexico and Corn as separate, but inter-related variables.  With a bit of set analysis I can display and color both series.  How about this for the results of clicking Mexico-Corn?

This strikes me as useful.  I can the understand the position of Corn in imports to Mexico, and the position of Mexico across all Corn importing countries.  See the chart subtitle for an explanation of the color encoding scheme.

Thanks again to to all the Guru Day speakers for the stimulating talks and the inspirations. Let’s do it again soon!

-Rob

You can download the example qvf here.