How best to map/analyze rates w/respect to the denominator?

[RussellTess]

I have a polygon grid that contains a percentage/rate. What I would like to show is how significant a rate is with respect to how large the denominator is, because obviously something with a 50% rate with a denominator 2 is not as bad of a rate as say something with a 50% rate with a denominator of 1000. 

[DanPatterson_Retired]

All the denominator states is the range of the parameter, so a 50% rate where the range of 2 yields 1 as the numerator... that same value of 1 a different scenario where the range of 1000 would yield a much lower value.  Unfortunately, you only have the percentage and not the range so you can't calculate the absolute value of the numerator to form any meaningful comparison

[RussellTess]

To be clear, I am the one calculating the rates, so I do have the numerator and denominator for each grid polygon.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

So by grid polygon, do you mean a fishnet? or is it actually a raster?

In any event, if you have the numerator, then you can do the calculations for a field (numerator/denom in %) and symbolize appropriately.  If it is in grid (raster) form, that can be done with the raster calculator.

The ratio of the denominators will remain the same in any event

(1/2 versus 1/10 is a 1/5 ratio which will remain constant regardless of the numerator).

If you don't have to use rates/percentages then don't, especially if trying to compare two different areas since it may be the absolutes (ie the numerator) that is important.  ie crime rates are pretty useless, unless the denominators of two areas are similar

[RussellTess]

Yes it is a fishnet and not a raster dataset. 

Essentially we have a grid with contains successes+failures= attempts. The current methodology standard is to calculate the success rate which is success/attempts. What I want to know is, is there a good method for showing the impact/significance individual rates for each polygon based on the number of attempts inside that polygon. For example, if you wanted to fix some variable which would increase the number of successes in a polygon, you would best be served by looking at areas that have both a low success rate and a high number of attempts, rather than just looking at the success rate.

Kinda looking for a way to visualize that on a map that is intuitive. 

Not sure if that makes sense.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

hmmmm you could at least symbolize the color of the polygons based on attempts, say a colour ramp low to high  which gets across the idea of how many attempts were made.  Secondly, you could use either labels to indicate the actual successes or.  In that way you get across both ideas.   

In 3D you could extrude the success based on the number and symbolize on the total attemps.

Basically... my preferences is to go with presenting both pieces of information... total trials and the successes

Or... think completely outside the box and use a 'Cartogram' to symbolize the total number of trials (they area gets bigger) and the colour to symbolize the successes.  Who said physical space is more important than relative space anyway

[XanderBakker]

You can also visualize it 3D, using an extrusion defined by the number of attempts and color to visualize the rate.