When Data Viz Trumps Statistics

Summary: Which is the most critical element in data exploration, statistics or data visualization? The answer is a little like the lyric'love and marriage, you can't have one without the other'. It can be tempting to skip the data visualization but it's frequently the key to making sure we aren't heading down the completely wrong path. How much trouble can you get into with statistics? That old catch phrase has been applied to our broader society for a long time but even a data scientist can run afoul of this maxim. I admit, when talking about data visualization, I'm usually thinking about telling the story of the data and the analysis to my non-data scientist clients.