How to create figures? - cogstat/cogstat GitHub Wiki

See more generally how to compile the results.

Overall, charts should display the information the analyses rely on (e.g., see below that axes reflect the measurement level, order is displayed for ordinal variables). In other words, charts should display the most important and relevant information for the given task.

Specifically:

• Styles
  • All charts should follow the chosen matplotlib style
  • A few exceptions and their justifications:
    • Dashed and dotted line styles are overwritten, because in some styles they are hard to recognize
    • Axes colors to make sure that they are visible
    • Font size to avoid too large fonts
• Titles
  • All figures should have a title
  • All axes should have titles/labels
  • For categorical/nominal axes preferably all values should be shown
• Axes
  • The axis styles should reflect the measurement level of the variable
  • Left and bottom axis are displayed, right and top axes are not displayed
  • Optionally, the range of the axis values can be set. This is useful when different variables/analyses/charts should be displayed and compared visually.
• Individual values
  • Raw data and sample properties charts should include the individual values. Population properties shouldn't include the individual values.
  • When displaying individual cases, size of the signs should be proportional with the number of cases with that values
    • Unless all signs denote a single case, the number of cases denoting the largest sign should be displayed
    • For closely related charts (such as in a correlational matrix, or panels of the same comparison), then we want the charts to be comparable; therefore, the chart should use the same sign size scaling. The size of the signs should be calculated based on all charts. However, the label should refer to the individual chart. For example, in one chart the largest sign is 2, while in the other chart it is 4; here, the scaling (size of the signs) should be based on 4, but the label says 2 and 4 as the largest sign, respectively.
  • With repeated measure data the neighboring condition values should be connected
• Ordinal variables
  • For all ordinal data display the rank of the values, see issue #24
  • See also the measurement level dependent axes

See also the chart related issues in the issue tracker.