![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve heard over and over again that you should plot the individual data points if you have fewer than 6 but personally, I would set that number much (much!) higher. The differences are only really apparent when you graph them (as above). One of the best examples is the Anscombe Quartet:Įach of the four datasets are identical (to at least two decimal places) when compared using simple statistics (mean of X, mean of Y, sample variance, correlation and linear regression). Simple statistics are great for describing lots of datasets but there will always be cases where they are insufficient. But what if those values are also similar? Enter the Anscombe Quartet ![]() ![]() In this case, we can describe the difference using the standard deviation or the variance (both of which come out to about 0.2 versus 1 for samples one and two respectively). If you look at the individual numbers you can see that the range of values is quite different: Talk amongst yourselves as I find some reference dolphins to sample.Ībove you can see that in two sampling trips, I found that the mean dolphin length both times was 2.7m. The problem is that mean alone is not that helpful in describing a population. If we measure a sub-population of dolphins we can make a few assumptions and extrapolate to every dolphin on the planet. We can never really know that number, all we can do (should we want to) is attempt to estimate it. For example, there is a value for the mean length of every dolphin on this planet at any given time. I think I’m right in saying that there exists a ground truth for everything (although Werner Heisenberg would disagree, but we’re going to ignore quantum mechanics for the time being). It shouldn’t need saying but for completeness, let’s start with the basics: Simple statistics are great but show me the data! In this post I’m going to explain how to display your data in a beeswarm plot and why you might want to do this. While this blog is principally about Image Analysis (turning images into numbers), Data Analysis (turning numbers into something meaningful) is also really important. ![]()
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