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QUICK SUCCESS DATA SCIENCE
The Best Chart for Comparing Presidents
Meet the segmented cumulative line chart
Have you ever heard of a segmented cumulative line chart on a shared timeline? The name’s not as catchy as line chart, bar chart, or scatterplot, but it blends a little of each to make something greater than the sum of its parts.
The idea behind this chart type is that sometimes breaking the line — that is, resetting a metric at meaningful boundaries — can reveal patterns traditional time series displays can obscure. By resetting each new series to zero, you can easily see magnitudes, patterns, and trends hidden in the data.
Here’s an example showing the increase in U.S. Federal debt during the last eleven administrations. Each sample point represents a fiscal year. The first chart shows nominal values and the second shows inflation-adjusted values in 1969 dollars (Nixon’s first term).
