https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/forecast-president.html
Comment Am Neumarkt:
The best information designers are summoned on each election day. It is a good time to learn about the best practices of data visualization.
This “paths to victory” visualization is one of the best I have ever seen. If the put some probabilities on each branch, it becomes a transitional decision tree to estimate risks used by investors.
Does it tell us anything useful directly? Not really. Not all branches are created equal. Without probabilities, It is as useless as a piece of blank paper. But it helps people do some little experiments to feel the competitiveness. In some sense, the probabilities are encoded in the reader’s head. Each reader provides a different reality of probabilities.
Also they started to report uncertainties. I remember last time they were using jittering pointers to educate people of the uncertainties. Now they have range of estimates. Showing ranges is an important step forward.
Comment Am Neumarkt:
The best information designers are summoned on each election day. It is a good time to learn about the best practices of data visualization.
This “paths to victory” visualization is one of the best I have ever seen. If the put some probabilities on each branch, it becomes a transitional decision tree to estimate risks used by investors.
Does it tell us anything useful directly? Not really. Not all branches are created equal. Without probabilities, It is as useless as a piece of blank paper. But it helps people do some little experiments to feel the competitiveness. In some sense, the probabilities are encoded in the reader’s head. Each reader provides a different reality of probabilities.
Also they started to report uncertainties. I remember last time they were using jittering pointers to educate people of the uncertainties. Now they have range of estimates. Showing ranges is an important step forward.
