I first implemented a visualization that tried to capture both the overall position of a participant, as well as their individual performance for that week. In this visualization, participants are ordered by their final finish, with color coding for their weekly and cumulative performance. For each week, the small square on the left indicates how they compared to others for that week (green = good, red = bad) and the rectangle on the right indicates their overall rank based on cumulative points. In this visualization, you can see that the top two finishers had built up enough of a lead to retain their top two spots despite bad finishes in weeks 14 and 17, and that strong performances in weeks 15 and 16 by the number six finisher (FA1) allowed him to take over the spots occupied by CR1 and JA1 (who finished 7th and 8th respectively).
I also tried implementing a visualization similar to the Kaggle visualization I liked. As in that visualization, each week represents the leaderboard for that point in time, with the shading corresponding to the final finish of the person in that position. I also added the ability to see where a particular participant finished for each week. You can see that in this case, the overall winner quickly climbed to the top couple spots and held on to that position from week 8 onward. You can see other participants with fairly steady positions as well as some others who came in to the top 10 in the final weeks.
So the visualizations were a success and I also played around with some alternate visualizations as well, including one I'll share in my next post that showed how the winner ended up running away with the pool.
