So previously I have rewritten a few of my Crime Analysis tutorials (in Excel) to show how to use Tableau.
It takes too much work to do a nice tutorial like that with no clear end user, so I will just post some further examples I have been constructing to self-teach myself Tableau. To see my current workbook, you can download the files here.
The real benefit of Tableau over static charts in Excel (or whatever statistical program), is you can do interactive filtering and brushing/linking. So here is an example GIF showing how you can superimpose the weekly & seasonal chart I showed earlier, along with additional charts. Here instead of a dropdown to filter by different crime types, I show how you can use a Treemap as a filter. You can also select either one element or multiple elements, so first I show selecting different types of larceny (orange), then I show selecting all of the Part 2 nuisance crimes.
The Treemap idea is courtesy of Jerry Ratcliffe and Grant Drawve, and one of my co-workers used it like this in a Tableau dashboard to give me this idea. Here the different colors represent Part 2 disorder crimes (Blue), Property Crimes (orange), and Violent Crimes (Red). While you cannot see labels for each one, it does has tooltips, so in the end you can see what individual cells contain when you also consider the interactivity component.
You can mash-up additional tables, graphs, and maps as well. Here is another example using Compstat like tables for crime totals by year, a table of counts of crime per street (would prefer to do individual addresses, but the Burlington CAD data I used to illustrate does not have individual addresses) filtered to the top 30, and a point map. You can select any one graphic and it subsets the others.
While Tableau has maps I am not real bemused by them offhand. Points maps are no big deal, but with many points they become inscrutable. You can do a kernel density map, but it is very difficult to make it look reasonable depending on the filtering/zoom. If Tableau implements something like Leaflets cluster marker for point maps I think that would be a bit more friendly.
Dashboards no doubt are a trade-off with space. You can only reasonably put so much in a limited space. But brushing/linking between graphics is a really big different between Tableau and other traditional static graphics. It may not always be necessary, but it can sometimes be useful.
Next up I have a few ideas to make a predictive model monitoring dashboard in Tableau.
Andrew Wheeler 