36-721: Statistical Graphics & Visualization Syllabus
Mini 1, 6 units, Tuesday/Thursday 1:30pm-2:50pm
Wean 4709

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Course Description:

This course will be a broad overview of determining and visualizing the structure in data. Basic graphical principles (e.g. Tufte) will be discussed, but the primary goal is to be able to utilize data analysis/visualization tools to explore data, summarize results, and identify structure, both expected and unexpected. Material will be pulled from books including Springer's "Handbook of Data Visualization" (Chen, Hardle, Unwin editors). This book in particular also contains several chapters on how to work with different languages/software packages. After some basics, topics will be chosen based on the research interests of the class.

Possible topics include:

basics of graphics, design choice, options, Tufte's Graph Principles
histograms, average shifted histograms
kernel density estimates
sploms, parallel coordinates, mosaic plots, trellis displays
3-d plots, projection pursuit, grand tour
multidimensional scaling, bipartite graphs
hierarchical trees, spanning trees, networks, directed graphs, treemaps
geometric graphs (delaunay triangulation, convex hull, etc)
comparing sequences
glyphs/icons
regression diagnostics, analysis of covariance plots, interaction plots, outlier detection
variable selection
smoothing techniques (nonparametric, splines)
clustering
visualizing matrices
social networks
visualizing Bayesian data analysis


There will be occasional homework and a final graphics design project. Complete understanding of the underlying statistical methodology is not a prerequisite but students should have a statistical background. The class will be appropriate for both beginning and advanced graduate students. Undergraduate enrollment requires instructor permission.

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