Fever Chart

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What Does Fever Chart Mean?

A fever chart is a graphical representation of changing data over time. For example, a fever chart can represent the change in population in a certain region over a period of time, among many other things. The fever chart has several applications in different areas. For example, a marketing professional may try to analyze the sales performance of the company over the last 12 months and compare that with that the 12 months of the preceding year. It is a great tool for identifying patterns, peculiarities and behaviors, among many other things, in data.

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A fever chart is also known as a time-series chart.

Techopedia Explains Fever Chart

Fever charts are considered important tools in statistics. When the values of variables are recorded and viewed over a long period of time, it is difficult to derive patterns or trends from plain data. However, when the same data is represented in a fever chart, it becomes easier to spot trends or patterns. For example, weather, business and the growth of insect population all exhibit certain cyclical patterns. In such cases, the variable does not typically exhibit a continuous increase or decrease, but varies depending on the time of the year and other factors such as weather or demand. With a fever chart, it is easy to spot such cyclical patterns.

There are many methods of creating fever charts. To start with, one can create simple to complex fever charts with the help of a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel. At the enterprise level, highly complex and customizable fever charts are created with programming languages such as JavaScript or any other programming language made for the web. Recently, fever charts are being linked to databases that aggregate big data and powerful analytics are being shown.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.