Visualizations for exploratory analysis of trends

1. Visualizations for exploratory analysis of trends

Welcome back! Now, we're going to focus on visualizations for exploratory analysis of trends.

2. Looking for trends

Identifying trends can provide a lot of business value. It can be used for planning marketing opportunities, whether it's running promos or ads during a certain time. It's also useful for logistical aspects of the business like scheduling maintenance or effectively managing staff. Trends can help decide when to increase or decrease product availability in a potentially cost-saving way. We can systematically expand our point of view by examining different patterns from the hour to the year.

3. Configuring data on Tableau

Tableau offers exceptional flexibility in analyzing trends. For example, when using a date and time field, there are numerous ways to configure it. There are several date levels from year, quarter to minute and second.

4. Discrete or continuous time analysis?

Tableau also allows time to be presented as discrete or continuous. You can think of continuous as a time series, meaning it presents data over time in the sequence it historically occurred. The level of plotted detail may vary, but the structure always conforms to track the time period "in series", thus, the name. One isn't better than the other, it depends what you're analyzing. Let's look at an example.

5. Example

Here are four charts. The left green charts present the dates continuously, while the right blue charts present the dates discretely.

6. Continuous example

If you look at the x-axis, you see that each month listed corresponds to a specific year and that the data is organized chronologically.

7. Continuous example

This can be represented as a bar chart too.

8. Discrete example

The blue graphs present data discretely. Again, we can tell by looking at the axis. We're looking at monthly trends, meaning the month labels are aggregated over the years. One benefit of discrete time analysis, is that

9. Discrete example

it can be sorted to highlight the highest and lowest periods.

10. Continuous vs. discrete

Let's compare the two. As you can see in the continuous example on the left, the sales values are given for every month, within every year. On the right you can see the same data displayed in a discrete way. This time the data is aggregated on a monthly level, meaning the bar for January aggregates the sales of January 2017, January 2018, January 2019, and January 2020.

11. Let's practice!

Tableau enables us to quickly experiment with seasonality and patterns in data - let's try it out for ourselves!

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