Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

phdoofus t1_jak9cwg wrote

Pro tip, show power laws using a logarithmic axis

4

subset1 OP t1_jakb9l1 wrote

Noted.

How come? I feel like I tend to see "power laws" looking like this, when I Google it.

1

phdoofus t1_jakdn7m wrote

Showing power law data on a linear axis can result in most of your data literally being invisible except for a couple of data points.

3

subset1 OP t1_jake0ge wrote

Ah I see what you're saying, although that was kind of the point I wanted to portray: that most of the funds are on the left and look minuscule compared to the few on the right.

And also that's why I posted the two grids for the bottom 20 and the top 20 since I thought it wasn't very helpful to show all 305 funds.

Thanks for the feedback though :)

3

kompootor t1_jalfo7j wrote

The graph's x-axis is just the funds sorted in order of their values, right? That fact that that's not the kind of x-axis that you can label and draw points on should indicate to you that the visualization is not ideal.

I think in your title assertion you're confusing "power law" with the "long tail". To verify this relationship you will need an actual x-y plot. The way to get there, from what you are describing, is with binning.

As others have pointed out something like a power law should be on a log-scale graph. When you do bins in an example like this you definitely want to try putting it on a log-log graph. But if you're not sure what you're looking for or demonstrating, you should output both log- and linear-scale graphs for your viewer.

2

subset1 OP t1_jak7ifp wrote

Where or how you got the data: Crunchbase.com and Sec.gov using Form D
The tool used to generate the visual: Subset.so (an easy to use spreadsheet on a canvas tool)

1