Statistical Graphics and more

Stopping by at http://www.gapminder.org, you will easily get to the “default” example, which shows the scatterplot of life-expectancy vs. income-per-person running through the years 1800 to 2009. You really have to look carefully to spot the problem with Russia in 1933. How do we explain a spontaneous drop of life-expectancy from 33 years to only […]

I was pointed to this nice video of work from Robert Kosara by Hadley via Antony. Emerging technologies – and muti-touch must be counted as such – offer new possibilities of creating an interaction with graphics. This implementation of Robert is certainly clean and straight-forward, but still raises the question, whether or not these operations […]

Although many of you might have seen this before somewhere on the web, I could not resist to post it as I used two of the effects in my visualization courses. As you can see, context is always key for a right interpretation … Enjoy!

Peter Huber referred to “the rawness of raw data”, a kind of data we would not expect to find in a textbook. The book of Fahrmeir and Tutz on multivariate modelling refers to the visual impairment data from Liang et al., 1992 in table 3.12: Nothing wrong here at first sight; but how would you […]

There are certainly many models, which try to “calculate” which team will win the 2010 soccer world cup. Looking at the teams that already dropped out, the range of models which were obviously not predicting correctly gets quite big. Here is a visualization of my favorite: For those of you, who more believe in numbers […]

Color brushing (i.e., the persistent assignment of colors to cases) was one of the most requested and most ignored (on my side) features for Mondrian. I gave in at some point and ever since I get the never ending complaint over using “the wrong” colors – which I now ignore for the most part as […]

It did start with only three players and the keeper on the board, which I used to explain my kids (first graders and below) what offside means, and their creativity expanded it to what looks like Joachim Löw’s strategy for the Ghana match next Wednesday: Let’s proceed with fingers crossed! (The strategy on the board […]

I never thought I would ever embed videos from FOX on my blog, but this one needs to be covered: Watch the latest business video at video.foxbusiness.com Watch SPSS co-founder Norman Nie talking about the “… unbelievably powerful open source language called R …” and “… I am not sure that SPSS is our biggest […]

Special times fuel the development in specific areas. E.g., during WWII a lot of (sometimes curios) inventions and technical optimizations came up – usually not supporting humanity. The Soccer World Cup seems to spur the development of soccer visualizations and sports visualizations in general. My favorite (and apparently not only mine) one is this overview: Querying […]

R did definitely not start to be THE statistical computing tool. The “two Rs” in far down-under just needed some tool which was not too expensive and structured enough to support the elementary statistics classes filled with hundreds of students. Another constraint was the computing lab which was large enough, but “only” filled with Mac […]

Tree layouts are not too uncommon in statistics. CART is build upon tree hierarchies and random forrest uses these trees extensively. Area based plots like barcharts or histograms are also well understood by most statisticians. But when it comes to joining the two concepts – which will yield treemaps – many statisticians get somewhat lost. […]

It was at the 1997 JSM in Anaheim, CA, when I peeked into one of the seminar rooms, and found the continuing presentation of the ASA graphics video library. Although, most of the movies are not really new, they are still very inspiring and interesting to watch. One of my favorites is Bill Eddy’s air […]