Before I left for China a few weeks ago, I said my next post would be on our Rth parallel R package. It’s not quite ready yet, so today I’ll post one of the topics I spoke on last night at the Berkeley R Language Beginners Study Group. ... [Read more...]

I’m one of many who bemoan the fact that statistics is typically thought of as — alas, even taught as — a set of formula plugging methods. One enters one’s data, turns the key, and the proper answers pop out. This of course is not the case at all, and ... [Read more...]

The latest issue of the American Statistician has a set of thought-provoking point/counterpoint papers on Simpson’s Paradox, with a tie-in to the controversial issue of causality. (I will not address the causality issue here.) Since I have long had my own thoughts about Simpson’s, I’ll postpone ... [Read more...]

This is the third in my series of three posts on my package freqparcoord with Yingkang Xie. (My next post after this will show how to use R to explore one of my favorite examples of “what can go wrong” in statistics.) Here is a very brief review of my ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I introduced my new package with Yingkang Xie, freqparcoord. Here I’ll illustrate some of the other uses to which the package can be applied. The freqparcoord package visualizes multivariate data by plotting the most frequent cases in the data, as defined by multivariate density estimation. ... [Read more...]

When you take a photograph, you can include the date in the image, so you remember when you created it.  (In fact, under EXIF format, it’s stored in the image file anyway, even if it doesn’t appear in the picture.)  Wouldn’t it be nice to make annotations ... [Read more...]

Recently my student Yingkang Xie and I have developed freqparcoord, a novel approach to the parallel coordinates method for multivariate data visualization.  Our approach: Addresses the screen-clutter problem in parallel coordinates, by only plotting the “most typical” cases, meaning those with the highest estimated multivariate density values. This makes it ... [Read more...]

Hi, Norm Matloff here. I’m a professor of computer science at UC Davis, and was a founding member of the UCD Dept. of Statistics. You may know my book, The Art of R Programming (NSP, 2011).  I have some strong views on statistics–which you are free to call analytics, ... [Read more...]