The Power of Visualization in Data Science
What is Visualization?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines visualization as:

(1) The formation of mental visual images.

In the context of visualization with data, it is necessary to add something to this definition, so that it becomes:

The formation of mental visual images to convey information through graphical representations of data.

If you are pursuing a career in data science, this is one of the most crucial skills that you can master, and it is transferable to virtually any discipline. Let us imagine that you are trying to convince your manager to invest in a company and you present them a spreadsheet full of numbers to explain to them why this is such a good investment opportunity. How would you respond if you were the manager?

If presented in visual form, information is often much easier to digest, especially if it makes use of patterns and structures that humans can interpret intuitively. If you want a quick and easy visualization that requires little to no effort, you can go with something like a pie chart or a bar chart. In terms of developing visualizations, this is often as far as most people go, and often, it is as far as they made need to go for there field of expertise.

Another factor that inhibits our use of visualizations is the amount of data we have available. How do I know if visualization is an appropriate method to communicate a message?

This is a difficult question to answer. One design study recommends that we assess the viability of using visualizations based on the clarity of our task and the location of the information.

Design Study Methodology: Reflections from the Trenches and the Stacks, Michael Sedlmair, Miriah Meyer, and Tamara Munzner. IEEE Trans. Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2012.

If we are in the top right corner of this diagram, it becomes feasible to develop and program interactive visualizations, which is the realm in which data scientists are now entering due to the persistently increasing scale of data resulting from the information explosion.

Information Explosion.

We are now living in a data-driven world, and it is only likely to become more data-driven. This is clear from multiple areas, such as important advances in developing large-scale sensor networks as well as artificial intelligence agents that interact with the world (such as self-driving cars).

In a world where data is sovereign, having the power to develop clear and impactful visualizations is becoming an increasingly necessary skill.
['Matthew Stewart', 'Phd Researcher']
['Communication', 'Data Visualization', 'Data Science', 'Art', 'Towards Data Science']