What chart type to use when visualizing time series

Tips on how and when to choose bar charts over line plots when visualizing time-series data

Photo by Jake Hills on Unsplash

Data visualization is a powerful tool for communicating information to a broader audience. This means apart from using the right color scheme, font size, and font type; using a proper chart type to depict the data is also important.

The focus of this article, as clear from the title, is time series. As a general convention, we visualize time series as line plots. But, if I say this is not always true, we can even use a bar chart to visualize time series. Will you say I am misrepresenting the data, or is it fine to use bar charts as alternates for line charts? Or is there an exception when using bar charts over line plots?

To understand this paradigm, first, let us look at the time series definition as stated on Wikipedia:

In mathematics, a time series is a series of data points indexed (or listed or graphed) in time order. Most commonly, a time series is a sequence taken at successive equally spaced points in time. Thus it is a sequence of discrete-time data. Examples of…