Statistical Graphics and more

As long as the final results are not yet published by the “Bundeswahlleiter”, I was curious to see how accurate the institutes did forecast the election result. Obviously the last polls were quite a bit off from the final results, and even the initial projections from the first counted voting districts were not too accurate. […]

Today, Marcel Reich-Ranicki aged 93, died in Frankfurt, Germany. Having survived the Warsaw Ghetto and loosing all his family in German concentration camps, it was all but reasonable to stay in post war Germany and believe in the culture of the “nation of poets and philosophers”. He did, and he did not stop to tell us how […]

The German election is only four weeks away, so it might be worthwhile to take a look at the historic data from the elections in 2002, 2005 and 2009. Unfortunately, the voting districts are all but stable, such that a direct comparison is not trivial. The maps show the voting districts, which where won by […]

Making Movies is not only the name of an album by Dire Straits, but also the invitation of the ASA Statistical Graphics Section to enter the video competition. You might find the link a bit late (where I can’t dispute, but most creatives prefer to deliver “last minute”, so there is probably still some time […]

This is what I got in the mail some days ago … SAS: conceived by Anthony J. Barr in 1966 STATA: Version 1.0, January 1985 BUGS: (Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling) project started in 1989  R: Version 0.16 is dated on April 1st, 1997 (core by R&R from the early 1990s) Hmm, if these are the modern statistical tools and techniques, […]

It took a while until I got the December issue of “Significance” shipped and finally got some time to read it, but the article from Jordi Prat “The L’Aquila earthquake: Science or risk on trial” immediately caught my attention. Besides the scary fact that you may end up in jail as a consulting statistician, it was […]

The weather channel wetter-online pointed me to the latest global temperature anomalies which made me think about this post. Everybody knows that worldwide temperatures are rising. Rising as well does the concentration of CO2, which is literally fueled by burning fossil fuels. Ok, here goes the proof that rising CO2 levels correspond to rising temperatures: […]

This is the third and last post on area based plots. Area based was certainly true for tree maps and mosaic plots, but falls a bit short for trellis displays, such that the term “grid based” would be more suitable. Nonetheless, all three plot types use conditioning within their core definition and the layout of […]

I once in a while stop by at the JMP blog, and I was surprised to find tools and techniques implemented in JMP, which I built into Mondrian in the early 2000s. In the post “Visualization of fuel economy vs. performance“, we find a showcase of using multiple smoothers in a scatterplot for acceleration versus fuel […]

I read the President’s Corner of the last ASA Newsletter by Bob Rodrigez the other day and had some flashback to times when statistics met Data Mining in the late 90s. Daryl Pregibon – who happened to be my boss at that time – put forth a definition of data mining as “statistics at scale […]

This one is almost too bad to present, but I could not resist: The pie chart shows the number of spectators for the past european soccer championships of the last 50 years – in a pie chart (found on an insert of the “11Freunde” soccer magazine ). Now “the Good” is too obvious and thus […]

Today is the IPO of Facebook and many of us are asking ourselves what it is, the prospective shareholders are investing in … The answer is quite simple: “You’re not the customer, you’re the product” Although I am not a friend of circular visualizations, if the whole thing we look at has no repeating nature, […]