The joy of data analysis

Music and snow.

Poke my eyes out

Perhaps your immediate response is: “I’d rather poke my eyes out with a burning stick than do data analysis.”

There’s a completely different reaction from a lot of people who have experienced data analysis.

Music

It’s not entirely clear why humans like music so much. Part of it may be the guessing game we do.  We perceive a pattern in the music and guess where it will go next.  One of two things happens:

• we are gratified to be right
• we are surprised to be wrong

We like being surprised and we like being right, and we like the tension of not knowing which it will be.  We look for patterns, and patterns within patterns. That experience of listening to a new piece of music also describes analyzing a new dataset.  We create an image of what the data are like; we learn how we are right and how we are surprised.  We then form a new image and dive in deeper.

We look for patterns, and patterns within patterns.

R is the grand piano

Twisting the metaphor beyond recognition, there’s a data analysis instrument that is outstanding at making music.  It is called R.  There are some technical reasons why R is good.  There are also social reasons:

• it is the lingua franca of statistics
• it is rapidly growing in applied data analysis
• there are thousands of contributed packages (as of this writing 4953 in the main repository)

Oh, and by the way, it’s free.

Sight

The dominant human sense is vision.  That means learning — the key component of data analysis — is largely visual.  Graphics are important.

In R you can imitate ugly and uninformative graphics as is common in some software.

Figure 3: Ugly and uninformative. You can also create exceptionally pretty pictures in R, like the Facebook friendship graph (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Strength of Facebook friendship by location.  Another possibility in R is to create something beautiful and deeply informative, like the death rate plot (Figure 5) courtesy of Rob Hyndman.

Figure 5: The male to female ratio of death rates in Australia from 1921 (red) through the rainbow to 2009 (purple).  If you were hasty enough to poke your eyes out before you learned that data analysis can be fun, don’t despair.  You can also analyze data in R with sound:

• The Play It by R package
• the sound of a tweet

Snow

It’s a thrill to discover something that no one else knows.  Data analysis is one of the surest routes to that feeling.  It’s like walking through fresh snow that no other creature has touched. There is a moment to savor after you’ve found something and before others know.

Epilogue

Joy drives the wheels in the great cosmic clock

from “Ode an die Freude” by Friedrich Schiller

Appendix R

The function that created Figure 3 is:

function (filename = "ugly.png") 
{
   if(length(filename)) {
      png(file=filename, width=512)
      par(mar=c(5,4, 1, 2) + .1)
   }
   x <- 2:11
   y <- c(10,13,13,14,17,15,14,16,18,17)
   plot(x, y, xlim=c(0,15), ylim=c(0,20), xaxs="i", yaxs="i",
      type="o", col="darkblue", lwd=4, pch=15, cex=2,
      xlab="", ylab="")
   usr <- par("usr")
   polygon(c(usr[1], usr[2], usr[2], usr[1]),
      c(usr[3], usr[3], usr[4], usr[4]), col="gray70")
   abline(h=c(5,10,15))
   lines(x, y, type="o", col="darkblue", lwd=4, pch=15, cex=2)

   if(length(filename)) {
      dev.off()
   }
}

Photo credits

Flutist in Nepal by blaackhawk via stock.xchng

Fast piano by bornagain via stock.xchng

Snow by ezaqury via stock.xchng

See also

Maybe you were looking for The Joy of Stats.

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