Tag: Data Analysis

Rick Wicklin 8
Comparing two groups? Two tips that make a difference

A common visualization is to compare characteristics of two groups. This article emphasizes two tips that will help make the comparison clear. First, consider graphing the differences between the groups. Second, in any plot that has a categorical axis, sort the categories by a meaningful quantity. This article is motivated

Rick Wicklin 15
Do dryer balls reduce drying time?

Editor's Note: My 8th grade son, David, created a poster that he submitted to the 2013 ASA Poster Competition. The competition encourages students to display "two or more related graphics that summarize a set of data, look at the data from different points of view, and answer specific questions about

Rick Wicklin 7
How to color clusters in a dendrogram

The CLUSTER procedure in SAS/STAT software creates a dendrogram automatically. The black-and-white dendrogram is nice, but plain. A SAS customer wanted to know whether it is possible to add color to the dendrogram to emphasize certain clusters. For example, the plot at the left emphasizes a four-cluster scenario for clustering

Rick Wicklin 0
Repetition factors versus frequency variables

A regular reader noticed my post on initializing vectors by using repetition factors and asked whether that technique would be useful to expand data that are given in value-frequency pairs. The short answer is "no." Repetition factors are useful for defining (static) matrix literals. However, if you want to expand

Rick Wicklin 4
How to interpret a residual-fit spread plot

In a previous blog post, I described how to use a spread plot to compare the distributions of several variables. Each spread plot is a graph of centered data values plotted against the estimated cumulative probability. Thus, spread plots are similar to a (rotated) plot of the empirical cumulative distribution

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