Statistical Graphics and more

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 [...]

There is this beautiful graph created by the facebook intern Paul Butler showing all (?) connections between facebook accounts: Paul’s article is called “Visualizing Friendships“, which I would more call “Visualizing connections between facebook accounts”, but that is probably a different matter. Although this is a beautiful piece of artwork, from a statistical point of [...]

I recently stumbled upon an old paper of a presentation I gave at the Interface conference in 1998, entitled “JAVA – the next Generation of Statistical Computing?”: It is very interesting to compare the things I envisioned 12 years ago and what actually came true. Here are some topics: Did Java change a whole lot [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It is just about a year ago (exactly January 6th, 2009) that a New York Times article on R did fuel the dispute on what statistical analysis tool is “the best”. One of the highlight of the article was a quote from SAS’ Anne H. Milley: “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end [...]