TOP-DOWN DATA ANALYSIS WITH TREEMAPS

Statistics Netherlands produces statistics about the economic activity in The Netherlands. These statistics are based on survey data and administrative sources, such as value added tax (VAT). A recent trend in the production of official statistics is to use a top-down analysis, which means that analysts first analyze high level aggregated data, and then zoom in on a more detailed level when necessary. In this paper, we discuss how treemap visualizations can be used for this top-down approach. We use comparison treemaps and density treemaps. Finally, we introduce a method to visualize confidence intervals in treemaps.