Statistical Rules of Thumb, Part III – Always Visualize the Data
From the post:
As I perused Statistical Rules of Thumb again, as I do from time to time, I came across this gem. (note: I live in CA, so get no money from these amazon links).
Van Belle uses the term “Graph” rather than “Visualize”, but it is the same idea. The point is to visualize in addition to computing summary statistics. Summaries are useful, but can be deceiving; any time you summarize data you will lose some information unless the distributions are well behaved. The scatterplot, histogram, box and whiskers plot, etc. can reveal ways the summaries can fool you. I’ve seen these as well, especially variables with outliers or that are bi- or tri-modal.
What techniques do you use in visualizing topic maps? Such as hiding topics or associations? Or coloring schemes that appear to work better than others? Or do you integrate the information delivered by the topic map with other visualizations? Such as street maps, blueprints or floor plans?
Post seen at: Data Mining and Predictive Analytics