Quote of the Week, Oct 12, 2007

This is an unusual Quote-of-the-week, in that I point you to [ABSTRACT] and a [VIDEO] of the recent talk at the Institute for Innovative Computing. See what you think!

Leland Wilkinson and Bea
Leland Wilkinson points out that flexible, generic, plotting programs, such as SigmaPlot, allow one to make “ungrammatical” plots. That is, one could take a histogram of a log of one’s data; and then find the mean. That is meaningless, he points out. He persuavely argues that one can define a strict “grammar” of procedures to avoid such “meaningless” visualizations due to unthinkingly swapping Two summarizing quotes stand out:

I assert the Grammar of Graphics is THE grammar of statistical visualization.

There is always a model. In any statistical visualization, we always have a model.
What is it? What is the mathematical model?

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