Introduction to How to Display Data and the Scatter Plot

This chapter provides introduction to data, how it can be portrayed, and some of the commonly used graphical presentational approaches. It is the role of the graphical data presentation to facilitate the highlighting of trends that might be displayed. There are some of the simplest forms of data presentation which include the scatter plot, the matrix plot and the histogram. Scatter plots are best used for data sets in which there is likely to be some form of relationship or association between two different elements included within the data. These different elements are generally referred to as variables. These are a useful diagnostic tool for highlighting whether there is any form of potential association, but they cannot in themselves suggest an underlying cause-and-effect mechanism.