Seth writes:
I'm writing a critique of how epidemiologists analyze their data and one thing they rarely do is provide scatterplots. I suppose their excuse is they have too many points. Do you know of any papers about how to make scatterplots with large numbers of points?
My reply: The book, Graphs of Large Datasets: Visualizing a Million (which I've been planning to review on this blog for literally over two years, I even took notes on it and everything) discusses this issue in details, including tricks such as alpha-blending.
My impression is that if you have millions or even thousands of points, a density plot can do the trick.as in page 149 of Red State, Blue State. Perhaps readers have other suggestions. But if you just want to make the point and give a definitive reference, I'd go with the Graphics of Large Datasets book.
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