Seminars: Statistical Graphics

Turning Statistical Ideas into Animations

Abstract:

Methods in statistics are often too abstract in terms of their
mathematical expressions, but on the other hand we can also find
visual explanations to some statistical methods. In this talk, we
explore several statistical models and algorithms in the form of
animations, ranging from basic topics in probability theories and
mathematical statistics such as Buffon's needle and LLN/CLT, to more
advanced methods like the kNN algorithm, k-means clustering,
bootstrapping and MC integration. In the end, we discuss the
implementation of animations using R and related tools, including the
animation package (Xie, 2009), JavaScript, ImageMagick, SWF Tools and
new possibilities with the R packages SVGAnnotation and FlashMXML
(Temple Lang, 2009).