The DataSaurus, Anscombe’s Quartet, and why summary statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt

When dealing with large amounts of data, we often use summary statistics like average, median, standard deviation, sum, etc. They’re useful because they actually hide data, they reduce the amount of information we need to look at to give us a sense of the data. But the same averages and can describe datasets that look vastly different.

Things I cover in the video:
- Anscombe’s Quartet:
- Alberto Cairo’s DataSaurus:
- Justin Matejka and George Fitzmaurice’s awesome website about their 2017 CHI paper:
- The Jobless Rate for People Like You (requires Flash):

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