Statistical graphics

What a 1997 JSS paper with interactive graphics looked like then and still does

In 1997, I wrote a paper that was accepted for the newly fledged Journal of Statistical Software. That article is still available at https://www.jstatsoft.org/article/view/v002i06. It looks nothing like the original published paper. Papers today are only published in pdf format, unlike the original which were delivered as html, with pdf being a secondary format o help readers who preferred a printed copy. My paper was titled “Calibrate your to Recognise High-Dimensional Shapes from their Low-Dimensional Projections”.

WOMBAT 2019

Workshop Organised by the Monash Business Analytics Team, sponsored by the Monash University Network of Excellence on High-Dimensional Dynamic Systems

The background to useR! 2018

useR! 2018 was held for the first time in the southern hemisphere, and the feedback from participants has been very positive. I have been asked to write about the organisation and this is a good way to get some of the planning and decisions and operations into print, so that it might be useful for others charged with conference organisation. There are a lot of people who made the conference a success, and their contributions need to be acknowledged.

nullabor

R package containing tools for doing statistical inference with data plots

Rookie mistakes and how to fix them when making plots of data

In this assignment, the focus was to practice data cleaning. Students suggested questions to build a class survey, to get to know the interests of other class members, and then completed the composed survey. After cleaning the data, a few summary plots of interesting aspects of the data were made. There are some common mistakes that rookies often make when constructing data plots: packing too much into a single graphic, leaving categorical variables unordered, reversing norms for response and explanatory variables, conditioning in wrong order, plotting counts when proportions should be the focus, not normalizing by counts, using a boxplot for small sample size.

useR! 2018

The conference useR! 2018 will be held in Australia July 10-13, at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre. This is the first time that it has been held outside Europe or North America.

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