Okay so we've covered pie and bar charts, histograms. What about time series?

So if we've got a
single quantitative variable so it's a number measured over time. Like time series, like profits over
time. Maybe we have business confidence level over time. Share market over time. Common idea
here is a line or a bar chart. And you might have seen like the line chart looking at stock prices or
stock index prices. Let's take another example let's look at consumer price index, which depending in
on if you've done economics already you'll know what that means, about how expensive products are
to consumers, the general products. And this is sourced from stat.go.jp, actual data, 2016 seasonally
adjusted CPI for Japan, and the 100 reference level is 2015. So it's relatively stable here for the first
sort of what nine months, it's slightly cheaper then it gets slightly more expensive but oh so hard I
can't really you know looking at this table well is there a trend here is there not mm-hmm maybe if we
put this in a line graph or a line chart. Now we can see ah so there's a bit of a trend, a dip then a little
peak then down again then that big rise up in the last few. So notice all this is in Excel so we're
looking at a line graph here, and you know we've got consumer price index we've got the months
labelled. Okay in this case we've just numbered them, maybe we would like to do January, February,
March use words, I've got a chart title. So notice how much more information and how quickly you
can gather that information from looking at the line chart versus just the table. So key, key there to
keep that thought in mind. Now you might want to play with things at this point, there's lots of
different options you can do. Maybe I want to highlight the actual points okay that where they are data
points and then I've got those connectors but they're not observed so I'm really highlighting the point
so I could do a different pattern here. So lots of different options but as you can see, following over
time to look for trends so much nicer to look at that graph. You can also use a bar chart, you could
just put these in bars instead of line graph, line graph is also popular. Finally, everything we've looked
at so far has been just one variable. What if I care about two things and I want to know the
relationship between two things? Advertising and sales we talked about in the previous topic. So here
I've got advertising levels, sales levels, okay so what's that telling me? Oh well I can look for a while
and it seems that bigger numbers in sales might have bigger numbers in advertising. Bit difficult to
kind of see, let's plot it. So this is called a scatterplot, where on one axis we have one variable on the
other axis we have the other variable, so they're the two variables, notice sales in thousand, always
give units on the y-axis. Advertising in thousands on the x-axis. Now we can clearly see it looks like
it's almost a pretty good straight-line relationship, linear relationship as we increase advertising sales
goes up. This is a good story that we're not wasting our money if we actually put more money into
advertising. So much easier to extract that information quickly and communicate that easily to, you
know, your managers to other people looking at the graph rather than looking at a table. So remember
that one.