Tyler Cowen links to a post by Sean Taylor, who writes the following about users of R: You are willing to invest in learning something difficult. You do not care about aesthetics, only availability of packages and getting results quickly. To me, R is easy and Sas is difficult. I once worked with some students [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Statistical graphics category.
Census dotmap
Andrew Vande Moere points to this impressive interactive map from Brandon Martin-Anderson showing the locations of all the residents of the United States and Canada. It says, “The map has 341,817,095 dots – one for each person.” Not quite . . . I was hoping to zoom into my building (approximately 10 people live on [...]
Faculty Position in Visualization, Visual Analytics, Imaging, and Human Centered Computing
David Ebert sends this along: Purdue University School of ECE Faculty Position in Human-Centered Computing The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University invites applications for a faculty position at any level in human-centered computing, including but not limited to visualization, visual analytics, human-computer interaction (HCI), imaging, and graphics. . . . Applications [...]
Textbook for data visualization?
Dave Choi writes: I’m building a course called “Exploring and visualizing data,” for Heinz college in Carnegie Mellon (public policy and information systems). Do you know any books that might be good for such a course? I’m hoping to get non-statisticians to appreciate the statistician’s point of view on this subject. I immediately thought of [...]
The pretty picture is just the beginning of the data exploration. But the pretty picture is a great way to get started. Another example of how a puzzle can make a graph appealing
Ben Hyde sends along this appealing image by Michael Paukner, which represents a nearly perfect distillation of “infographics”: Here are some of the comments on the linked page: Rather than redrawing the picture to make the lines more clear, I’d say: leave the graphic as is, and have a link to a set of statistical [...]
Hey—here’s a photo of me making fun of a silly infographic (from last year)
Here’s the story of the graph, which was “was shown as part of a training for FBI agents,” and here’s the more recent long form of my presentation.
Stephen Kosslyn’s principles of graphics and one more: There’s no need to cram everything into a single plot
Jerzy Wieczorek has an interesting review of the book Graph Design for the Eye and Mind by psychology researcher Stephen Kosslyn. I recommend you read all of Wieczorek’s review (and maybe Kosslyn’s book, but that I haven’t seen), but here I’ll just focus on one point. Here’s Wieczorek summarizing Kosslyn: p. 18-19: the horizontal axis [...]
The Grinch Comes Back
Wayne Folta writes: In keeping with your interest in graphs, this might interest or inspire you, if you haven’t seen it already, which features 20 scientific graphs that Wired likes, ranging from drawn illustrations to trajectory plots. My reaction: I looked at the first 10. I liked 1, 3, and 5, I didn’t like 2, [...]
Write This Book
This post is by Phil Price. I’ve been preparing a review of a new statistics textbook aimed at students and practitioners in the “physical sciences,” as distinct from the social sciences and also distinct from people who intend to take more statistics courses. I figured that since it’s been years since I looked at an intro [...]
An epithet I can live with
Here. Indeed, I’d much rather be a legend than a myth. I just want to clarify one thing. Walter Hickey writes: [Antony Unwin and Andrew Gelman] collaborated on this presentation where they take a hard look at what’s wrong with the recent trends of data visualization and infographics. The takeaway is that while there have [...]
A graphics talk with no visuals!
So, I’m at MIT, twenty minutes into my talk on tradeoffs in information graphics to the computer scientists, when the power goes out. They had some dim backup lighting so we weren’t all sitting there in the dark, but the projector wasn’t working. So I took questions for the remaining 40 minutes. It went well, [...]
My talk on statistical graphics at Mit this Thurs aft
Infovis and Statistical Graphics: Different Goals, Different Looks (and here’s the article) Speaker: Andrew Gelman, Columbia University Date: Thursday, November 29 2012 Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM Location: 32-D463 (Star Conference Room) Host: Polina Golland, CSAIL Contact: Polina Golland, 6172538005, polina@csail.mit.edu The importance of graphical displays in statistical practice has been recognized sporadically in the statistical [...]
Art/math
This seems like the sort of thing I would like: Drawing from My Mind’s Eye: Dorothea Rockburne in Conversation with David Cohen Introduced by Nina Samuel Thursday, November 29 6 pm BGC, 38 West 86th Street Benoît Mandelbrot, unusual among mathematicians of the twentieth century, harnessed the power of visual images to express his theories [...]
Tradeoffs in information graphics
The visual display of quantitative information (to use Edward Tufte’s wonderful term) is a diverse field or set of fields, and its practitioners have different goals. The goals of software designers, applied statisticians, biologists, graphic designers, and journalists (to list just a few of the important creators of data graphics) often overlap—but not completely. One [...]
“Communication is a central task of statistics, and ideally a state-of-the-art data analysis can have state-of-the-art displays to match”
The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society publishes papers followed by discussions. Lots of discussions, each can be no more than 400 words. Here’s my most recent discussion: The authors are working on an important applied problem and I have no reason to doubt that their approach is a step forward beyond diagnostic criteria based [...]
Choices in graphing parallel time series
I saw this graph posted by Tyler Cowen: and my first thought was that the bar plot should be replaced by a line plot: Six lines, one for each income category, with each line being a time series of these changes. With a line plot, you can more easily see each time series (these are [...]
Win $5000 in the Economist’s data visualization competition
Michael Nelson points me to this. OK, $5,000 isn’t a lot of money (I’m not expecting Niall Ferguson in the competition), but I’m still glad to see this, given that the Economist is known for its excellent graphics.
Animated drought maps
Aleks sends along this dynamic graphic from Mike Bostock: I’m not so happy with the arrangement of years by decade—the lineup of all years ending in 0, or 1, or 2, etc., seems a bit of a distraction—but in many ways the display is impressive. And, as often is the case with such graphs, once [...]
Watercolor regression
Solomon Hsiang writes: Two small follow-ups based on the discussion (the second/bigger one is to address your comment about the 95% CI edges). 1. I realized that if we plot the confidence intervals as a solid color that fades (eg. using the “fixed ink” scheme from before) we can make sure the regression line also [...]
Visualizing Distributions of Covariance Matrices
Since we’ve been discussing prior distributions on covariance matrices, I will recommend this recent article (coauthored with Tomoki Tokuda, Ben Goodrich, Iven Van Mechelen, and Francis Tuerlinckx) on their visualization: We present some methods for graphing distributions of covariance matrices and demonstrate them on several models, including the Wishart, inverse-Wishart, and scaled inverse-Wishart families in [...]
Graphs showing regression uncertainty: the code!
After our discussion of visual displays of regression uncertainty, I asked Solomon Hsiang and Lucas Leeman to send me their code. Both of them replied. Solomon wrote:
Graphs showing uncertainty using lighter intensities for the lines that go further from the center, to de-emphasize the edges
Following up on our recent discussion of visually-weighted displays of uncertainty in regression curves, Lucas Leeman sent in the following two graphs: First, the basic spaghetti-style plot showing inferential uncertainty in the E(y|x) curve: Then, a version using even lighter intensities for the lines that go further from the center, to further de-emphasize the edges: [...]
Visually weighting regression displays
Solomon Hsiang writes: One of my colleagues suggested that I send you this very short note that I wrote on a new approach for displaying regression result uncertainty (attached). It’s very simple, and I’ve found it effective in one of my papers where I actually use it, but if you have a chance to glance [...]
Robert Kosara reviews Ed Tufte’s short course
I always wondered what went on there. $380 x 500 people, that’s $190,000! I’ll have to remember to ask for more money next time I’m asked to speak for a commercial organization.
My upcoming talk for the data visualization meetup
Somebody asked me to speak sometime at a data visualization meetup. I think I spoke there a year or two ago but I could do it again. Last time I spoke on Infovis vs Statistical Graphics, this time I could just go thru the choices involved in a few zillion graphs I’ve published over the [...]