Compressing data

An article on A guide to online data plotting by LiveMint carries this quote from Gramener’s Chief Data Scientist:

“Data visualization compresses information quickly,” says S. Anand, 37, chief data scientist, Gramener, a Hyderabad-based data-visualization company. “For example, in a chart, a bar can give you a data set with its height, colour and thickness, so you have already compressed a table with three columns into one graph,” he explains. “A 40-page report can easily be converted into a single page of graphics.” By doing this, a large amount of data becomes easily accessible, and trends and highlights are easy to pick out, compared to a table of numbers.

This is sometimes like this — converting a 40-page report into a single page of graphics — hard to believe. So here’s the proof.

This visualisation (and its interactive version), showing the ODI performance of Indian batsmen…

… summarises information from a 150 page report with over 46,000 data points, all into a single sheet without losing any information.