The Importance of Visual Analytics

As mentioned earlier, "Visual Analytics" can be defined as the process of exploring and analyzing data by visualizing it as charts and graphs. This enables end users to quickly consume the information and, in turn, empowers them to make quicker and better decisions.

In this section, you will learn why data visualization is a better tool for evaluation than looking at large volumes of data in numeric format.

All of us have at some point heard the expression "A picture is worth a thousand words." Indeed, it has been found that humans are great at identifying and recognizing patterns and trends in data when consumed as visuals as opposed to large volumes of data in tabular or spreadsheet formats.

To understand the importance and the power of data visualization/visual analytics, let's look at one of the classic examples: Anscombe's Quartet. Anscombe's quartet is comprised of four distinct datasets with nearly...