John Tukey is a pioneer in exploratory data analysis. Whenever
we take samples of a product or of public opinion, we amass a collection
of data points. If there are only two numbers that describe each observation,
like the height and weight of students in a class, then that information
can be plotted on a graph and we can see if the points "cluster" to reveal
some relationship between the two quantities. But in the census data for
a large city there may be many different numbers that describe each observation,
three or four or more. John Tukey and his colleagues studied the "point
clouds" that arise in such situations and manipulated them on a computer
screen until patterns emerged that indicated relationships among different
variables. To this day, one of the most significant uses of scientific
visualization is in the analysis of such patterns in statistical data.
Software for rotating point clouds has been developed by
Data
Description Inc.
A site on Exploratory Data
Analysis covers many aspects of the topic, as does the
Engineering
Statistics Handbook.
For more information about John Tukey and his work, see
the
biography the John Tukey.
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