The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI

The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI

The Effective Statistician - in association with PSI

Why and how to show individual patients in your charts

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In our standard graphics, we usually present summary statistics only. The exception is the Kaplan-Meier plot showing also individual patients. Showing individual patients effectively tells us so much more about e.g. clusters, outliers, and extreme values. Join Benjamin and I while we dive deep into the following points:

  • Show uncertainty 
  • Show actual number of patients 
  • Give a feeling for the evidence 
  • Connect to the physicians seeing the individual patients 
  • Increase transparency 

How to create:

  • Spaghetti plot
  • Slope graph
  • Using jittering for categorical data or thickness based on numbers of patients 
  • Scatterplots
  • Animations over time 
  • Heat maps 
  • Bar charts with symbols for the patients 
  • Kaplan-Meier
  • Cumulative distribution function 
  • Waterfall plots 
  • Flowing data example of categorical data over time (find it here: https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-americans/)

Additional features:

  • Highlight the group means 
  • Making it interactive with hover over or filters or selections 
  • Sorting is crucial 
  • Combination with charts displaying group differences 

Solve problems: 

  • Unbalanced treatment groups 
  • Avoid over cluttered graphs
  • Time to read and explain complex graphs
  • Time needed to create complex graphs
  • Problems obscuring small but meaningful differences

Listen to this interesting episode and share this with your friends and colleagues!


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About this podcast

The podcast from statisticians for statisticians to have a bigger impact at work. This podcast is set up in association with PSI - Promoting Statistical Insight. This podcast helps you to grow your leadership skills, learn about ongoing discussions in the scientific community, build you knowledge about the health sector and be more efficient at work. This podcast helps statisticians at all levels with and without management experience. It is targeted towards the health, but lots of topics will be important for the wider data scientists community.

by Alexander Schacht and Benjamin Piske, biometricians, statisticians and leaders in the pharma industry

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