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I hope that's not a too trivial a question for this site.

I'd like to graphically represent the percentage of users that are x miles away from a certain point.

E.g. 60% live within 5 miles, 70 within 10, 80 within 15 miles. Is there a easily understandable graph to visualize that or should I present this information in textual information?

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    $\begingroup$ You might want to display density rather than percentages. If six times as many people live within 5 miles compared to how many live between 5 and 10 miles, then the 0-5 density is 18 times the 5-10 density, because there is three times as much area 5-10 miles away compared to 0-5. $\endgroup$
    – Acccumulation
    Commented Nov 3, 2017 at 19:07

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You may be looking for a straightforward gains chart. Just plot the cumulative percentage on the vertical axis against the distance on the horizontal axis. Add an initial zero to both series for a useful starting point, and potentially something corresponding to 100%, i.e., the distance of the user that lives farthest away. (If that is unavailable or would make for an unreadable chart, then just leave this off and only go to a cumulative percentage that covers "enough" users.) In R:

cumulative.percentage <- c(0,60,70,80,100)
distance <- c(0,5,10,15,25)
plot(distance,cumulative.percentage,type="o",pch=19)

gains chart

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The simplest solution is to collapse your individual datapoints into ranges.

For example:

  • 0-5 miles
  • 6-10 miles
  • 11-15 miles
  • 16-20 miles
  • 21 + miles

You might end up with 6 people who end up in the 0-5 miles range, 10 people who end up in the 6-10 miles range, and so forth. The important thing is to make sure that your ranges are mutually exclusive. This means that no person should fall into more than one category.

Once you have done that, it is quite easy to visualize your data using a simple pie chart.

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