Click the Original, Code and Reconstruction tabs to read about the issues and how they were fixed.

Original


Source: howmuch.net


Objective and Targetted audience

  • The main objective of this visualization is to analyze how an average american spends their annual income on different categories. Or in other words, we can say how an average American allocates its household budget annualy.
  • The targetted audience would be a economist, business student, american resident, or analysts.

The visualisation chosen had the following three main issues:

  • Deceptive Visualization The first issue come across while going through this visualization is the method choosen for the visualization is deceptive. The above visualization is represented in a form of pie chart and pie charts are not considered to be a good and accurate method for visualization.

  • Using area to depict quantity In the above visualization, the second issue we encounter is the issue of shape. Different shapes represent different portion of amount spend by american on various categories such as for Cash Contributions and Education triangle is used while for most of the others hexagon is used and the area acquired by them is also geometrically wrong. For example: Area of Housing sector(33.1%) should be 33times more then the Alcholic beverages(0.9%) but it’s not the case here.

  • Perceptual and colour issue Third issue with the above visualization is perceptual and colour.Almost same shade of chocolate brown colour was used for representing Entertainment and other expenses section while for Education and cash contributions nearly same shades of dark voilet colour was used.

After reconstruction

A Vertical Bar plot is created, which shows the decreasing order of expenditure by an average american on diffrent categories, with valuation on bar. Y- axis shows the diffrent categories and X-axis shows the amount spent on diff categories.

Reference

*HowMuch. 2020. Visualizing How Americans Spend Their Money. [online] Available at: https://howmuch.net/articles/consumer-spending-in-the-united-states [Accessed 20 September 2020].

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(RColorBrewer)


#Importing the data File
Expense <- read_csv("Expense.csv")
Expense
## # A tibble: 11 x 2
##    Item                           `All Consumer Units`
##    <chr>                          <chr>               
##  1 Food                           $7,729              
##  2 Alcoholic beverages            $558                
##  3 Housing                        $19,884             
##  4 Apparel and services           $1,833              
##  5 Other Expenses                 $2,214              
##  6 Entertainment                  $3,203              
##  7 Healthcare                     $4,928              
##  8 Transportation                 $9,576              
##  9 Personal Insurance and Pension $6,771              
## 10 Cash Contributions             $1,873              
## 11 Education                      $1,491
#Converting into numeric and removing "$ and ,"
Expense$`All Consumer Units`= gsub("\\$","",Expense$`All Consumer Units`)
Expense$`All Consumer Units`= gsub(",","",Expense$`All Consumer Units`)
Expense$`All Consumer Units`= as.numeric(Expense$`All Consumer Units`)

#Plotting the graph
Graph <- ggplot(Expense, aes(y = reorder(Item,`All Consumer Units`),fill = Expense$Item,
                             x = `All Consumer Units`)) + ylab("Category") + xlab("Expenses($)")+
  labs(title = "Consumer Spending in united States",
       subtitle = "Average Annual Person Expenditure by category")

Graph2 <- Graph +theme(legend.position = "none") + geom_bar(stat = "identity") +
geom_text(aes(label = paste(`All Consumer Units`, sep = ""))) +
  scale_x_continuous(limits = c(0,20500))

Data Reference

Reconstruction

The following plot fixes the main issues in the original.