EDA

Better cricket plots

I’m sitting watching cricket tonight, the first day of the Australia vs West Indies Boxing Day test. Just now video of retired batsman Chris Rogers being honored was played, along with a plot of his batting record, shown on screen similar to this one below: Howzat? What are they trying to show? What’s the data in this plot? Is it a bar chart? A histogram? What does color mean?

Statistical Sciences, Cornell University

This week I have been visiting the Department of Statistical Sciences at Cornell University. This is the home of many venerable statisticians. At first sight it appears that statisticians are spread all over the university, and technically they are because funding comes from many directions, but almost all are actually located in a suite in Comstock Hall. Professor Paul Velleman is one of the pioneers of data-centrist thinking about statistics. He produced the software called DataDesk in the early 90s that some saw as rivaling LispStat and particularly JMP for introductory statistics classes.

Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence

This week I have been visiting the new Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence. The center involves four universities, CMU, ISU, UC-Irvine, U. Virginia, and is a NIST Center of Excellence. The kickoff event occurred over Oct 26-27 at ISU, organized by Center Director, Professor Alicia Carriquiry. The speaker list included Barry Scheck (Co-Founder, The Innocence Project), Jo Handelsman (The White House Office of Science & Technology Policy), Philip Dawid (Emeritus Professor of Statistics, University of Cambridge), Anil Jain (Michigan State University) and Stephen Feinberg (CMU).

Data Science for Managers, 2015, Monash Conference Center, Melbourne

Graduates in Statistical Graphics Research at ISU 2015

Its exciting to report on the graduations from the working group this year. Niladri Roy Chowdhury defended his PhD thesis in Aug 2014, titled “Explorations of the lineup protocol for visual inference: application to high dimension, low sample size problems and metrics to assess the quality”, under my direction. He is a scientist at Novartis, Boston, MA. Susan Vanderplas defended her PhD in May, titled “Perception in Statistical Graphics”, under the direction of Professor Heike Hofmann.

EDA at the UN

On Nov 10 I was part of a celebration of John W. Tukey at the United Nations. This event kicked off a new UN initiative called Unite Ideas. Details of the event, and the initiative can be found here. There were five talks relayed live to an audience of several thousand, using google hangouts and a youtube channel, and listeners could post questions using the Q/A tool. My talk was titled “An Exploratory Data Analysis of OECD’s 2012 PISA Survey”s and I delivered it by computer from my office in Iowa.

New version of nullabor package released

The new version of nullabor contains numerical measures that quantify how close the plot of the data is to the null plots in a lineup. It is very difficult to quantify all patterns that might be read from plots, so these should be taken in a spirit ofa Herculean task. The goal is to get some sense of what people are reacting to in a plot, which could be then associated with the text descriptions from people, or with data from an eyetracker.