Pareto Chart

The Pareto Chart features a combination of line graphs and column charts.

This chart type is primarily designed to visualize the 80/20 principle named after Vilfredo Pareto, which means highlighting the most significant data points among a group of factors that is usually vast.

Widely utilized for various quality control and management activities, Pareto charts provide a visual representation of the most typical kinds and causes of various problems such as defects, errors, customer complaints, and so on.

Columns in a Pareto chart display the relative frequency, i.e. each point's contribution to the total of all data points, and are always drawn in decreasing order of their values from left to right.

Lines show the cumulative frequency that essentially is the running total of the relative frequencies.

Basically, Pareto charts can be effectively utilized in the following data visualization situations:

1. when the data you are analyzing indicates the frequency of defects or their causes within some process;
2. when you need to identify the most important of multiple factors.