Best Way to Visualize Large Number of Categories

Question

I have a large number of categories with a quantitative value that I have to compare visually in a web app. There's no way to group these categories together, they are independent of one another completely and have rather large value differences... Some counting in the hundreds others in the millions.

Visually, is there any good way to show this off? I'm working in Highcharts and looking at D3 as well to render this data, however the big issue is coming from trying to fit all this data into an area in a webapp while maintaining visual clarity and context.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

How about using a tag cloud like approach? The bigger the category, the higher the value?

Answer 2

See D3 and Highcharts are suitable for this kind of representation. What are your thoughts on the implementation...like how many figures you are looking. we have seen web-apps with more than 20 figures in a single page like FollowerWonk which uses more than 25 figures in single page.

However D3 is much vast in terms of the options that it provides. see this https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery. You can not see these with High-charts.

Answer 3

A treemap is probably best since it uses space efficiently and represents size reasonably well. Rectangle area is not as good as position or length for visual clarity, but it's better than circle area, word area, or angles.

In this example, color is random, but you can base it on another variable.

If your definition of "large" is under 100 or so then you might be able to use position or length with a dot plot or bar chart, respectively.

Answer 4

I would prefer a Tag-Cloud like approach. For your Data-Set it seems best to use a tag-cloud with a zoom like feature. I can't think of an existing solution for this but without any kind of zoom your small values might end up beeing unreadable (see @xan's answer). The huge values would zoom really huge (and bleed off the widget) to not disturb the view.