Exploratory Data Analysis - History

History

Many EDA ideas can be traced back to earlier authors, for example:

  • Francis Galton emphasized order statistics and quantiles.
  • Arthur Lyon Bowley used precursors of the stemplot and five-number summary (Bowley actually used a "seven-figure summary", including the extremes, deciles and quartiles, along with the median - see his Elementary Manual of Statistics (3rd edn., 1920), p. 62 – he defines "the maximum and minimum, median, quartiles and two deciles" as the "seven positions").
  • Andrew Ehrenberg articulated a philosophy of data reduction (see his book of the same name).

The Open University course Statistics in Society (MDST 242), took the above ideas and merged them with Gottfried Noether's work, which introduced statistical inference via coin-tossing and the median test.

Read more about this topic:  Exploratory Data Analysis

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
    Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)

    It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
    Henry James (1843–1916)

    The greatest horrors in the history of mankind are not due to the ambition of the Napoleons or the vengeance of the Agamemnons, but to the doctrinaire philosophers. The theories of the sentimentalist Rousseau inspired the integrity of the passionless Robespierre. The cold-blooded calculations of Karl Marx led to the judicial and business-like operations of the Cheka.
    Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)