34th Annual Summer Institute of Applied Statistics

June 17-19, 2009

Exploring Data Visually

Presented by Dr. Di Cook of Iowa State University

In this technological age, we live in a sea of information. We face the problem of gleaning useful knowledge from masses of words and numbers stored in computers. This course teaches the process of extracting knowledge from data, using interactive graphics as an integral part of the statistical analysis.

Students will learn about graphical methods for multivariate data, handling missing values, supervised classification, cluster analysis, longitudinal data, network data, and visual inference. Examples will be from topics such as tipping, spam, food quality, global warming, and music. Open source software, R and GGobi, will be used for all of the examples. In addition, the following R packages will be used: MASS, ggplot2, RColorBrewer, grid, reshape, splines, plyr, proto, maps, colorspace, nlme, rpart, randomForest, norm, Hmisc, som, kohonen, nnet, e1071, xtable, and mclust.

Dr. Cook is a Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University. She recieved an M.S and Ph.D from Rutgers University. Her research interests include dynamic graphics, exploratory data analysis, multivariate methods, and statistical computing. Dr. Cook is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and is the recipient of several prestegious awards and grants.
For more information, please visit Dr. Cook’s website: http://www.stat.iastate.edu/directory/personal.php?id=dicook

Workshop sessions will be held all day Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday morning. The Summer Institute will begin with a Tuesday afternoon golf tournament. Thursday evening we will have our traditional barbecue.