Radial charts are generally considered less effective than linear charts. Perhaps the only exception is in visualizing periodical time-dependent data, which is believed to be naturally supported by the radial layout. It has been demonstrated that the drawbacks of radial charts outweigh the benefits of this natural mapping. Visualization of daily patterns, as a special case, has not been systematically evaluated using radial charts. In contrast to yearly or weekly recurrent trends, the analysis of daily patterns on a radial chart may benefit from our trained skill on reading radial clocks that are ubiquitous in our culture. In a crowd-sourced experiment with 92 non-expert users, we evaluated the accuracy, efficiency, and subjective ratings of radial and linear charts for visualizing daily traffic accident patterns. We systematically compared juxtaposed 12-hours variants and single 24-hours variants for both layouts in four low-level tasks and one high-level interpretation task. Our results show that over all tasks, the most elementary 24-hours linear bar chart is most accurate and efficient and is also preferred by the users. This provides strong evidence for the use of linear layouts - even for visualizing periodical daily patterns.

中文翻译：

---

径向图和线性图的比较，用于可视化日常模式。

通常认为径向图不如线性图有效。也许唯一的例外是可视化周期性的时间相关数据，而径向数据被自然地支持。已经证明，径向图的弊端超过了这种自然映射的好处。日常情况的可视化（作为一种特殊情况）尚未使用径向图系统地评估。与每年或每周的周期性趋势相反，径向图上的每日模式分析可能会受益于我们训练有素的阅读在我们文化中无处不在的径向时钟的技能。在由92位非专家用户进行的众包实验中，我们评估了径向图和线性图的准确性，效率和主观评分，以可视化日常交通事故的模式。我们系统地比较了四个低级任务和一个高级解释任务中两种布局的并置的12小时变体和单个24小时变体。我们的结果表明，在所有任务中，最基本的24小时线性条形图最准确，最有效，也受到用户的青睐。这为使用线性布局提供了有力的证据-甚至用于可视化定期的每日模式。