How to Lie with Data | Misleading Graphs

Key Takeaways

what's going on everybody welcome back to another video in this series I show you how easy it is to manipulate and lie with [Music] data since I've been working in data analytics when I watch the news and I see different graphs and charts my kind of Spidey senses start tingling and they're like something is wrong with that graph or with that data like I'm really curious as to how they got that and so I'm going to be showing you in several different ways throughout this series how you can easily Mis lead and lie to people using data with that being said let's see how we can change the axes on our graphs to make them a little bit more misleading all right so let's take a look at what we're actually looking at here we have this chart and as you can see just visually on this chart it looks like we've had some dramatic increase in sales I mean from 2014 to I guess it's 2024 to uh 2015 we have some really dramatic sales going higher and higher and higher and and whoever we have for our data VI guy he's just killing it uh no that's not accurate um let's take a look at our data on the right hand side so in 2015 that's when our data starts it's at 500 and then it goes down Year bye steadily increasing until we get to 2024 at 640 now we don't know this unit of measurement it doesn't really matter for this example I have seen charts exactly like this and I am not joking you on the news and when I'm looking at at it on the news I'll tell my wife I'm like babe this is not accurate you can't show data like this it's very misleading it's very misleading now is it incorrect no but it is manipulative because they're trying to elicit a certain response and so when you see this your first response is wow sales have really been increasing now let's take a look at this axis right here we have our xaxis we have our y- axis our x- axis is perfectly fine it's just the year but for our sales volume our y- AIS is very misleading because we're starting just below the lowest amount back in 2015 that's where we're starting and that's actually not a very good place to start because what you're doing is you're putting basically the minimum and the maximum as your y- AIS and it can dramatically shape how this data is viewed now what I'm going to do is we're going to come over here to this misleading graph good this one's the misleading graph bad okay we don't want to do this and if you see this be very wary right let's come over here to the misleading graph good now we have zero all the way up to 700 now we could make the case for you know 650 or even 200 if we wanted to go in and change it we could do that but this is much more accurate it hasn't been as giant of an increase as this one right here we're showing the same data just in a different way and so it can be very misleading it be very manipulative if you select Y axis that don't really represent the data that well and we can come in here I'm going to right click I'm actually I'm going to click on this I'm going to right click and there we go I'm going to go to format axes and so we have Zer and 700 right here we could even change this let's let's get crazy let's do 250 and 650 I think this is uh not perfect but you know we're just pushing it in just a little I actually think this 700 looked a little better you can see that even this this looks a lot more accurate and you know you need to be aware of these Y axis they can and the x-axis depending on which one is kind of representing which variable but this is a very very very common way that I have seen people mess up data mess up charts and graphs and genuinely I think in some instances they're trying to mislead and show a bigger amount of sales uh maybe they want the stock price to go up and so they're like look at these sales look how massive they are if you dig into it if you actually went back and looked at the data it's not that big of increase I mean we're not increasing by even like 10% I mean from this year to this year it's like a 2% increase and it keeps going it's very very small increments we're not talking like 10 15% over here and so I've seen this in the real world a hundred times and I've seen people give presentations on this and then when I ask oh hey you know why is it like this they'll try to explain it to me and I'm like well you know you're not wrong you are representing the data you're just doing it and it's a bit misleading like when I'm looking at this I think we have some massive change in whatever thing we're looking at but it's actually kind of a small change and so this is one of the easiest and probably one of the most common types of manipulation and lies with data that you will see especially on the news I'm not trying to dog the news over here I've just seen this in the news a hundred times and I know how prevalent it is so in this series we're going to cover a ton of different scenarios where people can lie and mislead you and manipulate you with data but I hope that this is helpful I hope that you're going to learn from this and you will also take this and not make the same mistake with your data when you're presenting this uh to your boss or a client that you're really thinking about these things so if you found this helpful be sure to like And subscribe below and I will see you in the next video [Music]