Water Cooler Small Discuss, Ep 7: Anscombe’s Quartet and the Datasaurus | by Maria Mouschoutzi, PhD | Jan, 2025

DATA ANALYSIS

Why descriptive statistics aren’t sufficient and plotting your information is all the time important

Picture created by the writer utilizing GPT-4

Ever heard a co-worker confidently declaring one thing like “The longer I lose at roulette, the nearer I’m to profitable?”, or had a boss that demanded you to not overcomplicate issues and supply only one quantity, ignoring your makes an attempt to elucidate why such a quantity doesn’t exist? Perhaps you’ve even shared birthdays with a colleague, and everybody in workplace commented on what a weird cosmic coincidence it should be.

These moments are typical examples of water cooler small discuss — a particular sort of small discuss, thriving round break rooms, espresso machines, and naturally, water coolers. It’s the place workers share every kind of company gossip, myths, and legends, inaccurate scientific opinions, outrageous private anecdotes, or outright lies. Something goes. So, in my Water Cooler Small Discuss posts, I focus on unusual and normally scientifically invalid opinions I’ve overheard in workplace, and discover what’s actually occurring.

So, right here’s the water cooler opinion of as we speak’s submit:

The descriptive statistics match completely, so the datasets are mainly the identical. No must dig…