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There are many kinds of charts for visualising how a quantity (e.g. number of students in a class) may be broken up into small sub-categories (number of blue-eyed students, number of brown-eyed students, etc.) that sum to the total. A pie-chart or a bar-chart would both work fine.

However, I have a quantity which is produced by multiplying various contributions:

$$ \Gamma =\alpha \times \beta \times \gamma \times \cdots $$

I am trying to find a sensible way of visualising the relative contributions of $\alpha, \beta,\ldots$ to $\Gamma$. My only thought is to make a pie-chart of the logarithms of each:

$$ \log \Gamma = \log \alpha + \log \beta + \log \gamma + \cdots $$

but that feels artificial. Are there any standard chart-types that are used to visualise this kind of information? Thanks.

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    $\begingroup$ How would you represent negative logs on a pie chart? What would be the meaning of representing any logarithm as an angle or wedge area in a pie? Indeed, the underlying difficulty attaches to the basic problem of computing "relative contributions" to a total comprised of a sum of positive and negative numbers: what would you mean by that? $\endgroup$
    – whuber ♦
    Dec 3, 2018 at 22:23
  • $\begingroup$ @whuber That's an excellent point, which I hadn't considered as each variable in my problem is a positive contribution (i.e. $\alpha, \beta > 1$.) Once again, I wonder if there are any clever means of visualising these things. $\endgroup$
    – tom
    Dec 4, 2018 at 21:58
  • $\begingroup$ Histograms, boxplots, stem-and-leaf plots, violin plots, bean plots, rugplots, and kernel density plots--to name just a few--are all standard. $\endgroup$
    – whuber ♦
    Dec 4, 2018 at 22:00

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