BI and the Anscombe quartet

The anscombe quartet is showing us something that is also related to Business intelligence. In Business Intelligence it's familiar to show KPI's or business metrics. A KPI as one number hides some times important information like the anscombe quartet is showing us.

And, they all have the same mean, variance, deviation, correlation and lineair regression!

What is this saying us? The statistician Francis Anscombe suggested this quartet to demonstrate the importance of graphical data analysis and the effect of outliers before they decide on a statistical analysis on the basis of their characteristics. The data sets show that the simple statistical characteristics are not always sufficient in order to describe the data.

Conclusion

Be very cautious showing numbers in General Business Metrics and KPI's in your report and your dashboards. Tell the whole story behind a KPI or Business metric and do not only show a number.