Robert Grant writes:
This web page is something I constructed recently. You might find it useful for making artificial datasets that demonstrate a particular point for students. At any rate, if you have any feedback on it I’d be interested to hear it. I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible but in due course, I’d like to add more descriptive stats, an optional third variable and maybe an option to make one categorical. It might also be interesting to get students to use it themselves to construct ‘pathological’ datasets where the stats would lead them astray, to help them understand how to spot problems and the importance of diagnostic plotting.
Grant, you magnificent bastard! You’ve just published the Swiss Army Knife of slide and homework generators for undergrad statistics classes. Add a categorical predictor and I’ll buy you case of beer!
As Jeeves would say, I am gratified to have given satisfaction.
I wonder if it would help students cement the idea of correlation if they constructed sets with .6, .9, .2, etc. correlations. I’ll have to give that a try. Thanks.
I teach a large first year stats for the natural sciences class and can see this tool being useful in a number of applications.
Thanks for making this available.