According to a leading newspaper, out of the 56.4 million deaths worldwide in last decade, more than half (54%) were due to the health diseases. Heart disease and stroke are the world’s biggest killers, accounting for a combined 15 million deaths in 2015. These diseases have remained the leading causes of death globally in the last 15 years.
The visualization below shows statistics of people died between 2009 and 2014 with causes of death in terms of categories of diseases. The graph shows % of people died due to a cause at a particular age. They have also segregated the data based on gender and ethnicity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention classifies the different causes of death into 113 causes, which are grouped into 20 categories of disease and external causes for make it less complex.
What I liked:
The stacked area chart shows data based on gender and ethnicity like White, Asian Etc. As shown in image below, when you click on the different color band/area on the graph, it displays the age and percentage of people affected by the disease.
This makes it easier to see the impact of a disease group as age progresses. The graph also has an option to move to next and previous section using buttons and back to normal graph using show all button. Filters of gender and ethnicity are well thought to provide insight for a targeted group.
What can be improved:
- As mentioned earlier, the chart show data from 2005 to 2014 but if we look at the chart and hover around, it is difficult to say what percentage of people died, at what age due to a specific disease group.
- The chart shows combined data between 2005 through 2014. An additional graph showing the trend over time period would be a good enhancement that can indicate which type of disease is causing more deaths over time.
- If we want to compare the cause of death between different ethnicity or gender is it not possible in this chart. To see the cause of death in men and women, a filter needs to be applied but if we want to compare the causes of death between men and women, it is not possible to do in given graph.
How to improve to derive better insights:
- Tooltip can be added to existing graph that shows exact percentage and age for a specific cause. This will help users who are not only looking at trends but seeking precise facts. This example of Texas Oil Rigs(Click Here)shows how tooltip can be used to extract precise information from a chart.
- Add functionality to compare trends between gender or ethnicity. This can be achieved either by adding a multi-select filter in the existing graph or creating additional graphs showing comparisons between male – female and between different ethnicities.
- As mentioned in the second point of above section, the trend over the period of time is not shown in the graph. It would be a good idea to add time series animation to see trends over a time which is inclusive of percentage, age and year. This example showing Wealth and Health of Nations (Click Here) shows how time series animation can supercharge analysis when two dimensions other than time are more important.
The stacked area chart being a good way to visualize given problem, looking from a different perspective, it can be improved in many ways as mentioned above to give better insights to a viewer. Sometimes, looking at the same data from different perspectives can expose hidden facts residing in data as we can improvise above visualization by adding trends over time.
References:
- https://flowingdata.com/2016/01/05/causes-of-death/
- Wealth and Health of Nations http://goo.gl/9nPEUC
- Using tool-tip https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/texan-oil-rigs
- Using multi-select filters https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/ice-melting (Years drop-down is multi-select)