WOMBAT 2025
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Visualising Uncertainty with ggdibbler

Existing data visualisations of uncertainty are not effective at preventing false conclusions, despite their utility in understanding data variability. A new ggplot extension, ggdibbler, is introduced to facilitate uncertainty visualisation for preventing false signals, and its seamless integration into existing workflows alongside its alternative visualisations are illustrated.
Published

September 30, 2025

Visualising Uncertainty with ggdibbler

September 30, 01:20 pm

Adding uncertainty representation in a data visualisation can help in decision-making. There is an existing wealth of software designed to visualise uncertainty as a distribution or probability. These visualisations are excellent for helping understand the uncertainty in our data, but they may not be effective at incorporating uncertainty to prevent false conclusions. Successfully preventing false conclusions requires us to communicate the estimate and its error as a single “validity of signal” variable, and doing so proves to be difficult with current methods. In this talk, we introduce ggdibbler, a ggplot extension that makes it easier to visualise uncertainty in plots for the purposes of preventing these “false signals”. We illustrate how ggdibbler can be seamlessly integrated into existing visualisation workflows and highlight the effect of these changes by showing the alternative visualisations ggdibbler produces for a choropleth map.

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Harriet Mason

Harriet Mason is a final year PhD student. She is researching how uncertainty can be effectively communicated through statistical graphics, particularly in contexts where misleading interpretations must be actively avoided. She is the author of several R packages, including cassowaryr and ggdibbler.

Workshop Organised by the Monash Business Analytics Team