March 24, 2016

Graphics: what are they good for?

From Lucas Estevem, an interactive text-sentiment visualiser (click to embiggen, as usual)

sentiment

Andrew Gelman, whose class this was a project for, asks what the visualiser is useful for?

An interactive display is particularly valuable because we can try out different texts, or even alter the existing document word by word, in order to reverse-engineer the sentiment analyzer and see how it works. The sentiment analyzer is far from perfect, and being able to look inside in this way can give us insight into where it will be useful, where it might mislead, and how it might be improved.

Visualization. It’s not just about showing off. It’s a tool for discovering and learning about anomalies.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »