Education > Continuing Education > LearnSTAT Courses
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Fundamental Statistics Concepts in Presenting Data: |
Date: |
One-day course Friday, April 17, 2009 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. Eastern time |
Location: |
ASA Office Alexandria, Virginia Directions to the ASA Office |
*Cost: |
$475 for ASA Members $375 for Students $615 for Nonmembers *Registration fee includes course material and lunch on both days |
Registration: |
Register online or print out a registration form by clicking on the 'Register' box at the bottom of this page. Registrations will be accepted until the course fills, but should arrive no later than April 10, 2009. Registration is limited and will be handled on a first-come, first served basis. |
Attendees are encouraged to bring their laptops for hands-on components of course. Electrical outlets will be available for every attendee for the entire day.
Course Description:
Data displays are mental models for understanding distributions of data. At the heart of any data display lies the distribution of the data; a model for this distribution includes demonstrating and exposing sources of variation in the distribution.
Like a good map, a display of data ought to operate on several levels. At the lowest level (the highest level of granularity) are the data themselves. Further up are the actual distributions, each with its component summaries such as the mean or relevant quantiles. At the highest level are sources of variation in these distributions, the parameters in the (mental) model for understanding the data. The closer an architect can come to showing all these levels, the more information will be conveyed.
This course will present a number of principles, both developed by the masters (Minard, Tufte, Cleveland, Wilkinson, Wainer, etc) and discovered by the presenter, for constructing such displays that will allow the architect of the data display to present the data for improved understanding; it will not be simply a "Don't use pie charts" or "Here's a bad graph from USA Today" course. We will focus on uncovering and formulating *principles* for presenting data visually. Examples will abound.
Presenter:
Rafe Donahue is Associate Director of Statistics at Biomimetic Therapeutics, Inc and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Biostatisics Department at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. His passion for quality data graphics was kindled by a day-long course by Edward Tufte in the mid-1990s while working in the pharmaceutical industry.
He has since become a frequent and 'Kindly' Contributor on Tufte's message board and has worked on presentations of large and highly-multivariate data sets both in the pharma research and development and pharma commercial settings, along with presentations of complex medical center data in both still form and 'data movies.' He has taken part in the JSM Data Expo competition and lectured on data graphics presentations in both academic and commercial settings.
REGISTRATION IS CLOSED.
Questions? email LearnSTAT@amstat.org or call (703) 684-1221 ext. 1864.