Week 02

Data visualization

Statistician(s) of the Week

W.E.B. DuBois

Check out his book! I have a copy in my office.

Florence Nightingale

Announcements

• Annotations due Thursday
• Lab 01 due Thursday
• First quiz on Thursday. To prepare,
  • Week 01 & 02 lecture slides
  • Lab 01
  • AE in class today

A few notes / tips

• Add color = "white" to your geom_histogram() layers

• Check out different theme options in ggplot. Default is theme_gray(). I typically use theme_minimal() to de-clutter some of the background.

• The ggthemes package has many additional themes to choose from

• This blogpost “Themes to spice up visualizations with ggplot2” suggests several more packages with many additional themes to play with

• Make sure to use colorblind friendly pallets! scale_color_viridis_d (and its variations) is my default, scale_color_colorblind() is another common option, from the ggthemes package

• Save the fiddling with beautification until the end - this can be an endless time suck if you’re not careful :)

• Keep in mind that you’re not just practicing your technical coding skills, but you’re also developing your investigative skills as a data scientist - be curious about the data and dig further into it when your visualizations reveal certain patterns or unusual observations.

Application Exercise

• The remainder of class will be spent on AE-02.
• You can access it from GitHub.
• It is due at the end of class today.
• To turn it in, you should upload your .html file to Blackboard.