Aidan Kane » Data visualisation

The CSO’s detailed public finance data

Aidan Kane — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 03:20:30 +0000

My tuppence worth on fiscal data and fiscal plans on irisheconomy.ie is posted here.

More on animated population pyramids: small multiples

Aidan Kane — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:56:27 +0000

The animated population pyramid (Ireland 1950-2009) previously posted here can be used to generate this series of small multiple images. Click on the image below to see the pdf version for a better resolution.

Another animated population pyramid: Ireland 1950-2009

Aidan Kane — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:43:13 +0000

My previous example of an animated population pyramid for Ireland relied on data from Censuses in Ireland. The Census has generally been held every ten or five years in Ireland. My latest example relies on mid-year annual population estimates from the CSO, covering 1950 to 2009.

You can download the animation (a pdf file 226Kb) from
here.

You can view the file in your browser, and it can also be saved locally as a pdf file. The animation should work in recent versions of Acrobat Reader.

A number of basic features in the changing population structure emerge, I think, fairly readily from running the animation forward (maybe others will spot a lot more):

Most obviously, overall population growth, as the pyramid takes more real estate on screen
The missing young people in the 1950s and 1960s as the large numbers of young children don’t stay around long enough to be young adults/adults, so that the distribution is pinched.
A bit of a reversal of that by the time the early 1970s come along as emigration decreases and indeed we experience net immigration (mainly returned migrants).
The return of emgration in the 1980s, again reflected in the age structure as young people leave, and so e.g., the age group 15-19 doesn’t transition so readily into 20-24.
A big impact on age groups 25+ from immigration post 2004 or so
Absolute increases in older age groups (a percentage version of this graphic would probably work well to bring out proportions) and the systematically higher life expectancy of women at the upper age groups

In any event, a useful way of introducing some of the basic patterns in the data.

Animated LaTeX graph of US monthly unemployment and inflation 1948-2010

Aidan Kane — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 00:54:18 +0000

Another attempt to explore the animate package in latex, this time using US monthly unemployment and inflation data. I plot both time series from 1948 to 2010, from the wonderful data resource FRED at the St. Louis Fed.

I also plot a scatter plot of one series against the other, or rather, the last 36 months of data at any point in time, so you are seeing what a policy-maker looking backwards for a three year inflation-unemployment trade-off might see (roughly!).

The file itself (a pdf file) is big..far too big, (about 7.5 MB) …so be warned!

You can download the file here

It should work best in Acrobat Reader. But I think my own Perl script is pretty hacky, and not in a good way. I wrote it so that the pgfplots package can generate something that the animate package can deal with. I’ll probably work on trying to get file sizes down.

An animated empirical graph: Irish population pyramids

Aidan Kane — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:45:07 +0000

I’ve been exploring the LaTeX package animate which, as the name suggests, facilitates animated graphics.

I’ve been using the basic features of the package to generate an animation of population pyramids for Ireland, showing the evolution of age cohorts in the population since the first post Independence Census, in 1926. This file is a pdf file, so it can be saved and viewed locally. Never knew pdf was so flexible!

More examples of the package are available here.

Data visualisation

Aidan Kane — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:16:45 +0000

Fascinating 6 minute talk at TED on a data visualisation tool:

Or see it on TED