Title: Visualisation of two variables
Course: UGQuants (SSPS) > Section: Data Visualisation

Visualisation of two variables

Visualisations can provide an overview of the possible relationship between two variables .  The main advantage of investigating such relationships in visualisations is that the patterns may become more intuitively obvious to the reader than they are in a series of numeric statistics.  In addition, humans are capable of identifying complex patterns in images, hence visualisations allow for non-linear relationships to be much more easily identified than the use of statistical techniques which often assume a linear relationship between two variables (for instance Pearson correlation).  Finally, while bivariate statistics can provide a good summary of the overall strength of a relationship between two variables , visual representations can provide an insight into the presence of any outlying or unusual cases which don’t appear to fit an overall pattern.