Books
There are hundreds of statistics texts so the best advice is to find one that you can use. Sometimes it helps if the examples are in your subject area. Look for a book that talks about data, not just formulas. Old books might be easier for concepts but not up-to-date for computing. Also there are a lot of fun ‘pop statistics’ books that talk about numerical thinking in society at large.
Social Media
Put yourself out there if you have a question. There are countless groups and postings on Linked-In and Twitter. Also programming sites like StackOverflow.com and software company sites might be relevant.
But don’t be surprised if your simple question about some data turns into a heated debate. Statisticians love to discuss work but as with any other group, we have some cranks. As with any web discussions, learn the motives of the writer.
Software
There are many choices for statistical software at various levels of technical skill and ease of use. The American Statistical Association (ASA) Section on Statistical Computing has put together the following listing: http://www.amstat.org/careers/statisticalsoftware.cfm. It describes features and benefits for some common and specialized packages.
Graphics
Charts and graphs, which once required manual drawing and then specialized programming, infuse all of daily life now. Web sites and print publications on all subjects casually provide illustrations with data. Free interactive graphics software is abundant. In offices, Powerpoint ® slides filled with bar and pie charts are expected with any table of numbers, perhaps pulled from 3-click EXCEL® graphs. For all of the choices of color and shape, there is little thought put into what the graph encodes and what the viewer can glean from the flashy display.
In the past 25 years several thinkers have emerged to address the graphics quandary. Edward A. Tufte, Professor Emeritus of Yale, has published 4 ‘coffee-table’ books that explore how data and images can connect. A true Renaissance man, he uses examples from Gallileo, the Napoleonic wars, fish ecology, aerodynamics, and contemporary sculpture. He is known for coining the phrase ‘chart junk’ and his tirade against bullet-point style PowerPoint ®presentations. William S. Cleveland, formerly of Lucent/Bell Labs and now a professor at Purdue University, wrote two more pragmatic books, The Elements of Graphing Data and Visualizing Data. Since their publication, the concepts have spread to other texts and software manuals. The junkchart blog, http://junkcharts.typepad.com , is a fun forum for discussing the good and the bad.
Tufte and Cleveland advocate ‘small multiples’, displaying many graphs of each level of a category on one page or screen. A classic example of ’small multiples’ from Visualizing Data and The S-Plus User’s Guide, is the barley yield data below.
Each site for the planting is a separate panel on the trellis. There are 10 varieties labeled on the side of the panels. The red and blue are yields for different years.
Trellis graphs can be used to show any kind of category. A type of trellis is a subject plot. A subject offers a visual story than can be hidden when only looking at averages and statistical tests.
The freeware version of the S Language, R, has emerged as the de-facto standard for statistical research - www.r-project.org. The commercial S-version, S-PLUS is available from TIBCO Software, Inc.
Spotfire®, a TIBCO product that integrates with statistical languages, goes even further, perhaps to the extreme.
The five graphs above in a tiled display show the results of a drug screening for a cancer compound that should inhibit tumor growth. Clockwise, the tile combines a bubble plot, a three-D graph with response by color, a trellised heat map that looks at 9 plates at once, a segmented histogram, and a two-D plot with response by color. The power in an active SPOTFIRE session is to select out data simultaneously in the displays, dig deeper into sections with the slider bars, and make discussing large data more productive. Tableau® is a popular product for interactive visualization with business data. Other business intelligence products have some interactive graphics capabilities.
Statistical graphics like this were once only available in scientific research. Now they are part of daily life through various media websites. Still the goal of gaining insight into data might conflict with other goals of graphics, such as to advocate a view or just shock people.
Contact us at 201-673-4301 if you want to discuss something you read or want to do with technology.
