Plot Balalaika: Simple Chart Designs for Long-Tail Distributed Data

摘要

Current approaches to summarising large arrays of data for presentation and communication mostly comprise reporting means with, e.g., Bar-charts. These methods are well-suited for unimodal, ideally normally-or near-normally distributed data, but are misleading for long-tail distributions that comprise most of the Big Data. We propose a succinct visualisation format, parallel in simplicity to bar-charts, that is suitable for communicating the gist of long-tail distributions, and show its efficiency empirically.