statshorts

Graphical displays are a major element in exploratory data analysis and important for communicating one's findings. But when working with confidential data, like personally identifying information, or data that is subject to business secrets, compliant plotting can be difficult, as graphed data points can reveal information on individual observations from the data. Analysts working in research data centers, for instance, are commonly subject to the following "rule of thumb" (taken from  Bond et al., 2015 , sect. 2.3): "Graphs in themselves are not permitted as output. The underlying (aggregated) data may be submitted as output, which when cleared may be used to reconstruct graphs in the researcher’s own environment." What this means is that computing aggregates and graphing them is split in separate procedures. This slows down data exploration and may discourage the use of graphs overall, potentially risking the loss of their analytical power . Would it not be n...