Here is how to improve your charts, graphs, maps, and plots: Erase non-data ink. Erase redundant data ink. Maximize the ratio of data to ink. Show data variation, not design variation. The surface area of graphical elements should be directly proportio... [Read more...]

The Mandelbrot Set is perhaps the most famous fractal of all time. It's simple in its definition: iterate the complex equation zn+1 = zn2 + c (starting with z0 = 0) for various values of c, and if doesn't go to infinity then c is part of the Mandelbrot Set. The result, however, is ... [Read more...]

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I picked up the AT&T Laboratories Cambridge database of faces for a clustering application. The database consists of images of 40 distinct subjects, each in 10 different facial positions and expressions. Typically, the goal of clustering in these data is to recover the ‘true’ partition, or that which isolates images of ... [Read more...]

Which of the following two charts (both created with R) to you prefer? This dotchart: Or this bar chart? Andrew Gelman (who, incidentally, is speaking at the October NYC UseR meeting) prefers the dotchart prefers a line plot (update: see Gelman's comment, below), but personally I think the bar chart ... [Read more...]

The ggplot2 package for R is an amazing system for creating entirely new visualizations of data. It allows data analysts to tell a detailed, meaningful and yet easy-to-interpret story about complex and/or unusual data sets. To promote more data stories being told, ggplot2 author Hadley Wickham has organized a ... [Read more...]

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The devastating heatwave in Russia now seems to be over, but not before killing thousands, causing extensive wildfires, and destroying crops. But how severe was this heatwave, compared to past summers? Physicist and climate scientist Joe Wheatley looks at the record of temperature and rainfall in Russia over the last 60 ... [Read more...]

ESPN's Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) recently suggested that the primary cause of dwindling interest in Red Sox games by fans is that baseball games these days are too long. "It's not that fun to spend 30-45 minutes driving to a game, paying for parking, parking, waiting in line ... [Read more...]

Drew Conway continues his analysis of the Wikileaks data. Having concluded that the data appear legitimate (except perhaps in one region, based on a Benford's Law analysis of the numbers in the documents), Drew follows up with a spatio-temporal analysis of activity within Afghanistan, based on the datelines of the ... [Read more...]

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We've looked before at how you can annotate geographical maps using R, but what if you want to overlay data onto a globe of the Earth, using Google Earth? The RKML package for R (from the OmegaHat project) allows you to do just that, by providing a high-level interface from ... [Read more...]

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The always-interesting R blogger and political scientist Drew Conway -- and self-styled luckiest man on earth -- just announced some very happy news: he just got engaged to his future wife! Congratulations, Drew! (Drew proposed the traditional way, on a lovely European vacation. But if he'd just held off a ... [Read more...]

Now that Spain has won the World Cup, it's interesting to go back and look at some metrics from the matches and see if we can tease out what characteristics made for a winning Cup team this time around. Fortunately, the Guardian's Data Blog has made a wealth of World ... [Read more...]

Now that the 2010 survey is over, you might be wondering what we can learn from the data when the aggregated results are published. For a good guide to the kinds of questions you'll be able to answer, take a look at StatJump, where you can see tables and charts of ... [Read more...]

LATITUDE + LONGITUDE + OVERPLOTTING FIX = MAPS Decision Science News is always learning stuff from colleague, physicist, mathlete, and all-around computer whiz Jake Hofman. Today, it was a quick and clean way to make nice maps in R without using any map packages: just plot the latitude and longitude of your data ... [Read more...]

I really like R‘s stem function, it creates a stem-and-leaf plot right in the R console, no fancy graphics devices required! In a recent R-help post, Ralf Bierig presented a very nice ASCII scatterplot representing two densities. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any R function that will generate ... [Read more...]

For the last couple of years, Mexico has been in the midst of an escalating drug war, with violent crime on the upswing in many areas. But tracking the impact quantitatively is difficult: in Mexico, about 85% of crimes go unreported, and corruption leads to inaccurate reporting in some districts. Diego ... [Read more...]

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