Statistical Graphics and more

Given the trouble I got into after my post on the Japan earthquake, I probably should stay put when it comes to looking at data on hazardous events … More seriously, as statistician (or data analyst in general) we often lack the expertise from the domain expert, who usually collected the data. Today, in a [...]

The current issue of the Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter features two invited articles, which both look at the “graphical display of quantitative data” – one from the perspective of statistical graphics, and one from the perspective of information visualization. Robert Kosara writes from an InfoVis view:  Visualization: It’s More than Pictures! Information visualization is [...]

Mr. Beck’s London Tube map is a real design classic. Besides the timeless and universal design, the chosen geographical distortion has always been a point of discussion. At fourthway [via infosthetics] we find a nice animation between the “real map”, which is geographically correct and the stylized map, which is optimized for reading and aesthetics. Here [...]

This post could as well be called “Which Smartphone is right for you?”, or “Plotting conditional distribution – but the right way!”. Here is the original visualization from Nielsen, which is not really bad, but still hides the important message to some extent. Kaiser adequately pointed out that some features – important features – of [...]

This is the ideal post to combine Infographics/Visualizations with the user interface aspect. I found it on Kaiser’s Junk Charts. Having spent only a few years of my life in the US and being inculturated in orderly and standardized Germany, I can tell that most faucets here come pretty close to the “should be” situation. This [...]

We definitely live in a world of overflowing information – certainly more than a human can and wants to digest. Of course, the internet is the principal motor for this, but it also happens with the design of simple everyday’s things. Antrepo has a nice example of how product designs can be reduced to what [...]

It is a common theme when statisticians look at data visualization output – they ask for the model. Although I am usually not an unconditional friend of building models (especially before you understand the data), but I feel the need for some kind of model in order to make this visualization more than just a [...]

The last Good & Bad post already dealt with using ranks and certain related problems, but the thing Udo pointed me to is really of extraordinary absurdity. The Daily Mail has a feature about the most popular names: The problem is already explained in the footnote such that I don’t need to comment any further [...]

There is an impressive 54 minute documentary on “visualization in the media” at datajournalism.stanford.edu. The site also has quite a bit additional material literally around the video. The story seems to be tailored around (or at least crosses it every now and then) the paper by Segel and Heer. Here are some significant quotes (with [...]

Stephen Few posted this illustration of the typical BI process on his site: I largely agree with Stephen on the different steps, which are very similar to any kind of data analysis process (you will probably leave out the “integrate”, “store” and “report” step in a non-BI / non-datawarehouse environment). But there is one crucial point [...]

WILEY’s Interdisciplinary Reviews are positioned as “WIREs publications focus on high-profile research areas at the interfaces of the traditional disciplines.” Currently there are six areas covered Climate Change Cognitive Science Computational Statistics Nanomedicine and Nanobiotechnology RNA Systems Biology and Medicine and five other fields (including Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery) upcoming in 2011 and 2012. [...]

This post is neither fish nor fowl. My review on Kaiser’s book is way overdue, as I got stuck somewhere in the middle of the book. In the meantime, Georgios pointed me to this video of David McCandless on TED, as we recently talked about people’s fears and how the media has its share in it [...]