SoMaPS Colloquium talk - Prof. Dianne Cook

Title: Myth busting and apophenia in data visualisation: Is what you see really there?

Abstract. In data science, plots of data become important tools for observing patterns, discovering relationship, busting myths, making decisions, and communicating findings. But plots of data can be viewed differently by different observers, and it is easy to imagine patterns that may not exist. This talk will describe some simple tools for helping to decide if patterns are really there, in the larger context of the problem. We will talk about two protocols, the Rorschach, which can help insulate the mind from spurious structure, and the lineup, which places the data plot in the context of nothing happening. There will be an opportunity for the audience to try out these protocols in examining data from current media.

Speaker biography. Dianne Cook is Professor of Business Analytics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research is in the area of data visualisation, especially the visualisation of high-dimensional data using tours with low-dimensional projections, and projection pursuit. A current focus is on bridging the gap between exploratory graphics and statistical inference. Technology plays an important role in data visualisation for evaluating effectiveness and for public consumption. Di utilises technology such as virtual environments, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and eye-tracking in her work, and makes an effort to share her work with open source software. Di is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, elected member of the International Statistical Institute, past-editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, elected Member of the R Foundation, and current editor of the R Journal. Education is an important part of her contributions, and mentoring graduate research is a significant activity. Several of her students have won the prestigious American Statistical Association John Chambers Software Award, including Hadley Wickham, Yihui Xie, Carson Sievert, and most recently, Monash student Earo Wang.