Statistical Graphics and more

— that’s it for this year, see you in 2012 (the latest) – au revoir! — (With now 7 years of full Tour de France data, I might start to compare the different tours on a more “global” level.) Again, the Tour de France has to compete with the soccer world championship – ok, this time […]

I feel ashamed for this boring title, but hope that the entry can make up for it. This visualization did inspire me, as a comment did point to my Tour de France visualizations. As with all visualizations, we need data first – this sounds trivial, but is sometimes a frustrating show-stopper. After I found the […]

The German Bundesliga has its (very short) winter break after 17, i.e., half the games played. We all know – or at least would not disagree immediately – that good players will cost a team a fortune, and the more a team can invest, the better will be the result. Using the (potential) value of […]

Presenting at the Dutch Chemometrics Society annual meeting late May this year, I heard a talk of Klaas Faber on the “Athletes Biological Passport” – especially targeting the Pechstein case. Now that the Swiss court finally confirms the ruling, things popped up again. Faber, being the expert of Pechstein, talks about “torture the data until they […]

Sometimes the title may promise more than the post can hold … but I still try my best. As you might know, there is the usual visualization of the stage times, total times and ranks of all riders in the regular post to start with. As we have more data on the Tour and riders, […]

Now that the world cup is over, and we finally have a winner, it is time to compare the expected values with the real outcome – don’t mix this up with comparing the outcome we would have liked to see with the real outcome, which is often done in business analytics … The expected values […]

July 3rd was probably the worst day to start the Tour de France, as many of us where captured by the quarter finals, which sent home nobody less than Diego Maradona’s dream team, which may dream for another four years now … Although the world cup yet has to see its best matches, I will […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It’s time again to trace the evolving Tour de France. This year is different as Lance Armstrong joined the field again and I am staying in France right now, attending the useR!2009 conference – this may probably limit my updates until Sunday … Stage Results cumulative Time Ranks (click on the images to enlarge) That’s […]

Here we go in the fourth year after the years 2007, 2006 and 2005. Stage Results cumulative Time Ranks (click on the images to enlarge) “The trace of a winner” – (a spanish winner makes me suspicious though …) That’s it for this year!  (Thanks to Sergej for updating the scripts)