{"id":5560,"date":"2022-03-01T01:00:41","date_gmt":"2022-03-01T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=5560"},"modified":"2022-02-28T16:56:58","modified_gmt":"2022-02-28T23:56:58","slug":"line-charts-with-trend-lines-are-often-fake-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/line-charts-with-trend-lines-are-often-fake-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Line Charts with Trend Lines are often Fake News"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Ever seen a line chart with a trend line that implies there was great improvement? Probably not. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/673648590?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I&#8217;m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Hospitals-Improving\/dp\/1259641082\/\">Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;If you&#8217;re listening to anything in the news, they always talk about \u201cfake news,\u201d right? Fake news: somebody made stuff up. But in my experience, when I\u2019m wandering around [seeing] all of these presentations and poster presentations at trade shows and stuff, I keep seeing all these line charts with trend lines in them. \u201cOh look! We have a trend line! It&#8217;s reducing whatever it is,\u201d right? Or \u201cIt&#8217;s increasing whatever it is.\u201d But it doesn&#8217;t have a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/hypothesis-testing\/chi-square-goodness-of-fit-test\/\">\u201cgoodness of fit\u201d metric<\/a> on it.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;I want you to consider that any time you see a line chart with a trend line on it that does not have the &#8220;r squared goodness of fit&#8221; metric on it (so you can tell if it actually is a good fit or not), you should consider that to be \u201cfake news.\u201d They&#8217;re pretending they made an improvement! Until such time as you put that into a control chart and you can see where it actually stepped down, I think you should consider that to be fake news. Don&#8217;t trust it.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now, the reason I know this is because I\u2019ve taken a number of things that I have seen at these trade shows where they left me the numbers so I know what the numbers are, and then I actually [recreated the chart] and found out that the&#8230; goodness of fit metric was less than fifty percent\u2026 sometimes thirty percent. Not very good at all. So I wouldn&#8217;t want to stake my reputation on that because that would be silly, all right?<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week: Stop using line charts with trend lines, they are dumb and they are misleading; they are often fake news. Start using control charts, and there&#8217;s plenty of software like QI Macros out there to draw it. If you&#8217;re not using mine, use somebody else&#8217;s, but start using control charts! It&#8217;ll change your life and how you run your business, and it&#8217;ll simplify all the noise that is out there in your organization\u2026 and you will not be misleading people.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Let&#8217;s create a hassle-free America; hassle-free healthcare. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week.&#8221;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever seen a line chart with a trend line that implies there was great improvement? Probably not. Here&rsquo;s why: &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma For Hospitals&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re listening to anything in the news, they always talk about &ldquo;fake news,&rdquo; right? Fake news: somebody made stuff [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":5660,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211,290,7],"tags":[41,442,328,168,441],"class_list":["post-5560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data-mining","category-improvement-insights","category-six-sigma","tag-excel","tag-fake-news","tag-line-chart","tag-qi-macros","tag-trend-line"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5560"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5680,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5560\/revisions\/5680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}