Comparing the Cases of Viral Hepatitis, Type A and B in the United States

I am a Student in Swansea University, currently trying to complete a Data Visualisation Assignment using the information from Project Tycho (https://www.tycho.pitt.edu/). Knowing that many people are diagnosed with Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B, I was intrigued to see the number of cases that exist in the United States of America and compare them. To display the data is used a ‘Box-and-Whisker’ plot, showing both diseases along with their cases in the time period of 1952-2001.

Light Red = Viral Hepatitis, Type A . Dark Red = Viral Hepatitis, Type B.

Visual Design Type: Box-and-Whisker Plot.

Name of Tool: Tableau.

Country: United States of America.

Disease: Viral Hepatitis, Type A and Viral Hepatitis, Type B.

Year: 1952 - 2001.

Visual Mappings:

  • Colour – Each disease has a different colour that is present in the States.
  • Size – The size of each coloured section representing the two diseases is allocated to the number of cases that were reported in those states in the time-span.

Unique Observation: From this visualization the cases of both diseases are nearly identical for each state in the time-span, meaning there is no comparison that can be depicted. However, from this visualization we can see that the State of California has the highest cases of both diseases by a very large margin.

Data Preparation: To gain this visualization, each spreadsheet that contained the information of the diseases had to be appended to each other. Also, irrelevant rows and columns were removed.

Viral Hepatitis A - DOI - 10.25337/T7/ptycho.v2.0/US.40468003
Viral Hepatitis B - DOI - 10.25337/T7/ptycho.v2.0/US.66071002

If anyone would not mind in giving feedback and answering some questions I have, it would be greatly appreciated.

  1. Is there a better way to display 2 diseases, their cases and the States they exist in? I tried looking for more visualisations but i could only come across this one.

  2. Should I include if fatalities occurred in the given states along with the cases?

Thank you.

I don’t know if box and whisker plot is really the right sort of visualisation.

These sorts of plots are typically used to represent spreads of data where are you are only showing two points per state.

Whisker plot is not a good choice here. When comparing two time series (this is what the data actually represents, values over time), you should make use of other chart tools. For example, a box plot with two bars each year showing the different cases would be a good idea. Another option would be an area plot, where the areas represent the different cases.