Rules for Describing Various Data Types

Follow these (very) basic rules about displaying data types:

• Use barplots or piecharts and counts or proportions to show categorical data
• Use ridgeline plots to show the distributions of scalar (a.k.a. measurement) data
• Show binary variables just like cateogorical variables: as bars showing counts or proportions
• Use tables to show relationships among categorical variables
• Use scatterplots to show relationships between scalar variables

Along with these visualizations, you should include the following:

• For categorical variables, the frequencies and percentages
• For scalar data, the mean and standard deviation, and if you have space, the median, the mode, and the standard error of the mean
• For binary data, the frequencies and proportions