Statistical Graphics and more

Well, R is definitively here to stay and made its way into the data science tool zoo. For me as a statistician, I often feel alienated surrounded by these animals, but R is still also the statistician’s tool of choice (yes, it has come to age, but where are the predators ..?) What was usually […]

Yes, it’s been a while since the last post, but hey – isn’t it a good sign that I presumably do not stumble over too bad graphics every day (or I just might not have the time to write about it …) This example comes from SAS’s online manual on their Visual Analytics tool. And […]

Each year after the group stage, there is the much awaited drawing of the eighth-final, which essentially defines a team’s fate. So far the thing is not too complicated, as there are 16 teams out of which we need to generate 8 games – no problem if it would be possible to draw the teams without […]

The Tour 2014 is over and has a winner – Vincenzo Nibali. As some readers asked how they could analyze the data interactively themselves, I post this video by Antony Unwin, who looked at the 2013 data, which was the 100th anniversary of the Tour. If you are inspired now, go download the data and […]

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 […]

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 […]

Developing software in academia usually does not lead to commercial products, and if the intention is just this, the academic qualities often fail to reach common standards. Nonetheless, there is always the hope that commercial products might pick up the ideas generated in academic software projects. Being involved in many software projects on (interactive) statistical […]

The gap of the new “digital divide” between those who only use computers when they are as easy to use as iPads and smartphones and those who like (or at least accept) to type commands to perform jobs, seems to get bigger and bigger. R – the lingua franca of statistical computing – is exactly […]

Thanks to the data provided by the USGS, we can take a look at all earthquakes since 1973, which cover almost the last 40 years of earthquake activity worldwide. Let’s first take a look at the yearly development of the earthquake activity overall: The apparent increase in the last 10 years is striking – though […]

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 new issue (Vol. 21, No. 2) is out now. Featured articles are: barNest: Illustrating nested summary measures by Jim Lemon and Ofir Levy You say “graph invariant,” I say “test statistic” by Carey E. Priebe, Glen A. Coppersmith and Andrey Rukhin Computation in Large-Scale Scientific and Internet Data Applications is a Focus of MMDS 2010 […]

The new version (1.2) of Mondrian adds the following (significant) features: Scatterplotsmoother now includes “principle curves“, which are one of the nonlinear generalizations of principal components. All smoothers can be plotted for subgroups, which have a color assigned, “smoother by colors“. The color scheme has been refined once again, to make use of colors as […]