Dynamic Visualization of Economic Indicators

• Activity Number: 213
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, August 5, 2013 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Government Statistics Section
• Author(s): Katherine Jenny Thompson*+ and Mark Wallace
• Companies: U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Census Bureau
• Keywords: data visualization ; time series plots ; error bars ; economic indicators

Abstract

Data visualization tools can take existing statistics and re-express them in ways that facilitates interpretation by a variety of audiences ranging from the sophisticated "power user" to the novice. Because these tools can expand a program's audience dramatically, it is vital to develop tools that "tell the complete story," for example, including measures of reliability along with point estimates. This report presents the ongoing efforts at the U.S. Census Bureau to develop and implement a standard set of data visualization tools for usage with the monthly and quarterly economic indicators produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. We present two different types of data visualization tools: one that presents a "snapshot" of all indicators at a given point in time and another that presents dynamic interpretations of the time-series data for a specified indicator (totals and change estimates).