RFC: Statistics in Subsurface

Hartley Horwitz hhrwtz at gmail.com
Wed May 13 10:20:45 PDT 2020


I showed these plots to a colleague of mine - a non-diver, but someone who
uses Strava and likes to plot his running progress.

* The first box plot with whiskers wasn't understood by him.
* the second bar graph was understandable, but similar to Dirk, he asked
for x and y axis to be flipped
* he wasn't sure how to interpret the "dot" in the 3rd graph.  I explained
it was just a variation of the bar graph.

* I showed him a more traditional box & whisker plot, and he didn't
understand that.
* I showed him a line graph with 3 lines: min, mean, max.  That he
understood.

This is someone who didn't take a statistics course in college/university.

I've also attached a quick visualization on histogram vs box & whiskers.  A
histogram has a familiarity to it because it is just a series of bar
graphs.  It isn't compact though.  The box and whiskers is the same as a
flipping a histogram on its side and then summarizing the quartiles, mean
and outliers. Cool, compact, not familiar to many though.

Now to argue against myself, maybe the only people who will look at
statistics are those that love statistics and so we should target that
audience, in which case box & whiskers has my vote.




---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Pedro Neves <nevesdiver at gmail.com>
> To: subsurface at subsurface-divelog.org
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Wed, 13 May 2020 14:26:07 +0100
> Subject: Re: RFC: Statistics in Subsurface
> Adding my comments to this discussion...
>
> Attached you'll find a list of the stats I currently have for my logs. I
> use the csv export facility and do everything in R, using RMarkdown. The
> only thing missing so far is the SAC analysis, because Subsurface
> doesn't (yet) exports the SAC.
>
> The file Subsurface_stats.pdf gives an idea of the kind on analysis I do
> (just basic stuff, really) and the PLots.pdf file show a few
> visualization ideas for some of the stats. I do not mean to impose on
> any one else's ideas - It's just an attempt to maybe summarize and help
> the discussion. While other users might have different needs, I think
> the basic stats are covered...
>
> I hope this helps...
>
> Cheers:
>
> Pedro
>
>
>
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