Fundamentals of Data Visualization ― A Primer on Making Informative and Compelling Figures

Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options.

This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems and pitfalls and provides simple and clear guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization.

• Explore the basic concepts of color use as a tool to highlight, distinguish, or represent a value
• Understand the importance of redundant coding to ensure that you provide key information in multiple ways
• Use our directory of visualizations: a graphical guide to the most commonly used types of data visualizations
• Get extensive examples of good and bad figures; learn how to use figures in a document or report
• Learn methods for visualizing amounts and proportions, paired data, trends, and time series
• Visualize distributions with histograms and density plots, boxplots and violin plots, and ridgeline plots

Professor and scientist, with background in theoretical and computational biology, theoretical physics, and evolutionary biology. Author or co-author of over 140 scientific publications, covering topics in computational biology, mathematical modeling, simulation, bioinformatics, genomics, evolutionary biology, protein biochemistry, virology, population genetics, and statistics.