Jul 27, 2026
Your Scatterplot Is Hiding Half Its Data
Below is a scatterplot of New York City yellow taxi trips from January 2024, fare against distance. It is real data, straight from the city's own records. I cropped the axes to trips of 0 to 20 miles and 0 to 90 dollars, which holds 2,836,835 of the month's 2,964,624 records, or 95.7 percent of them, and keeps the file's nonsense out of the frame: one trip is logged at 312,722 miles, another at minus 899 dollars. Inside that window, nothing has been done to the data but draw a dot for each trip.