Charting with Plotly Dash

3: Using Dash to select charts for a better storytelling

Photo by Girl with red hat on Unsplash

Introduction

One of the most frequent questions in data visualization is trying to establish which is the most appropriate graph according to the nature of the message. This question is even more relevant when the objective of the visualization is not only to show trends or patterns of change of various quantitative variables over a given period of time, but to link it to a compositional analysis (how each of the parts that make up a whole are related). The most commonly used visual tools are multiple lines charts, stacked bars charts, and stacked areas charts.

When the time period corresponding to the horizontal axis of the display has many values, it may be difficult to establish the exact value of each numerical variable indicated on the vertical axis. It is then convenient to add a second graph showing these exact values to improve the quality of the message. In this situation, the most commonly used visual tools are pie charts, treemaps, and sunburst charts.

The question is: which is the best combination to achieve the best storytelling for the situation described above?

We will try to answer this question with an application developed using the Python framework Dash, using a dataset…