Interactive graphics

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.

During the week, I received final confirmation notice that the special issue of Statistical Science that Vince Carey and I put together is finally published. There are four papers from leaders in the field of statistical computing research: John Chambers, Duncan Temple Lang, Michael Lawrence and Michael Morgan (newly minted members of R Core) and Yihui Xie, Heike Hofmann and Xiaoyue Cheng. The links to the overview and the four papers are below.

It is always with a sense of unease that I reduce a whole semester’s work into a single letter grade, and to alleviate this feeling, I often pack the gradebook into an interactive graphics system like ggobi or cranvas, and perambulate over it. In the second issue of Chance 2014, I wrote about doing this on grades for a large introductry statistics class using interactive graphics. The class had on the order of 100 students, and grades from exams, homeworks, labs, worksheets, online quizzes and a data analysis project.