Before Your Very Eyes: Visually Unraveling the Mysteries of High-Dimensional Data

• Activity Number: 40
• Type: Other
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 2, 2009 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: ASA
• Author(s): Antony Unwin*+
• Companies: Uni Augsburg

Abstract

Data visualization methods can be a bit like attention-grabbing headlines, they don't necessarily provide solid evidence, but they can be very useful in generating ideas and providing terse summaries. Potentially there is a great deal of structure in high dimensional data and neither statistical models nor graphical displays can hope to do more than identify some of the features. Quite often there will be insufficient data to draw formal conclusions, even though it is usually possible to draw insightful pictures. If there is a lot of data, they are likely to be heterogeneous, and better investigated with a collection of local analyses than with a single all-embracing global analysis. In this overview talk we look at strategies for visualizing high dimensional data sets and describe some graphical tools for this kind of problem.