For this question, I wanted to ask if we could quickly determine the answer by visually comparing which graph is steeper. I find that calculating each percentage increase or decrease individually can be quite time-consuming. However, I’m not entirely confident that eyeballing the graphs is accurate since the denominator in percentage changes can significantly affect the results, which might not be apparent at first glance.
What approach would you suggest as the most time-efficient way to handle this?
It kinda works to narrow things down yeah because then you’re looking only at the intervals (2010,2012) and (2016,2018). Now you know that (170/120) - 1 > (240/190) - 1 so yeah the answer is clear.
To be fair though, brute forcing this still takes 30 seconds to 1 minute so yeah you don’t even have to “risk” it.
That is my question that in cases of “Percentage change” can this be “eyeballing method” be applied everywhere? Won’t a change in denominator affect things if the graph only shows lets say absolute values?
“everywhere” is a strong word, so i’d say no for roughly the reason you’ve mentioned. For example, the transition from 1 to 2 results in much bigger “percent increase” than 100 to 101. The whole point of “eyeballing” here was to narrow down which intervals you actually want to check. If you’re not certain then just do the check for all the intervals. It takes 30 seconds anyway so optimization isn’t even the concern here.
