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jtkme t1_iu94cq9 wrote

While it's nice to plot colors, to me this is a good example of average being a meaningless statistic for a set of data.

What does the average of a set of colors mean? What does it tell a person?

If you pick random colors per country does it look the same as this map? I'm guessing it does. If so, the data is telling you nothing.

How about plotting the age of the flag for each country as a heatmap?

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pastelkawaiibunny t1_iua8ip1 wrote

That’s what irritates me. It’s absolutely useless. Looking at this, if I didn’t know better I’d say that most countries have flags that are brown or purple (like you could assume with other ‘average’ stats). But no, that’s absolutely wrong. I don’t think any European country actually has those as a main color. This really doesn’t tell me anything useful about flags.

Tallying up individual colors and getting a mean or mode from that would be a lot better- I expect you’d get red or blue, but it would be an interesting distribution to see.

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jtkme t1_iu94p6j wrote

Color averaging can be interesting for photos, but there it's a visual effect not a data conveyance.

How about taking the average or top colors of all photos taken in a country and rendering it on the map?

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