I discussed whether zero needs to be included on all scales in a recent post, ending by saying, “Not including zero in the baseline is one way to exaggerate a trend for those who don’t read labels carefully. Can you think of others?” One reader, Aleksey Nozdryn-Plotnicki, commented that changing the dimensions of the chart can have the same effect. The aspect ratio of a graph is the ratio of the height to the width of the smallest rectangle enclosing the data, so changing the aspect ratio can change the dimensions of the chart. This post shows how we can hide variation or exaggerate trends by changing the aspect ratio. We use the number of stop and frisks in New York City as data for the following figures. Figure 1 shows the number of stop and frisks from 2002 to 2011 using the defaults of xyplot in the lattice package of R
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