resources
visualizations
presentations
lunch break
Distractions and amusements, with a sandwich and coffee.
visualization + design
Hilbert Curve Art, Hilbertonians and Monkeys
I collaborated with Scientific American to create a data graphic for the September 2014 issue. The graphic compared the genomes of the Denisovan, bonobo, chimp and gorilla, showing how our own genomes are almost identical to the Denisovan and closer to that of the bonobo and chimp than the gorilla.
Here you'll find Hilbert curve art, a introduction to Hilbertonians, the creatures that live on the curve, an explanation of the Scientific American graphic and downloadable SVG/EPS Hilbert curve files.
Hilbertonians—creatures on the Hilbert Curve
Take a look at the Hilbertonian Posters and perhaps buy one. I take custom requests.
Hilbertonians: 101
Hilbertonians are creatures that live in the depths of the Hilbert curve. They live across three adjacent orders of the curve (e.g. 2, 3, 4). The come in many different personalities and many classes exist.
They are social—they always appear in multiples of 4. This is a consequence of how they are defined. A single Hilbertonian has never been seen.
Their genomes are 20 bases long. They only have 2 different types of bases. Out of a possible 220 = 1,048,576 genomes, only 104,976 (almost exactly 10%) produce living and breathing Hilbertonians, defined as those whose bodies form a contiguous shape. The other 943,600 are unfortunately unviable. The genomes of every Hilbertonian can be downloaded.
news + thoughts
Quantile regression
Quantile regression robustly estimates the typical and extreme values of a response.Quantile regression explores the effect of one or more predictors on quantiles of the response. It can answer questions such as "What is the weight of 90% of individuals of a given height?"
Unlike in traditional mean regression methods, no assumptions about the distribution of the response are required, which makes it practical, robust and amenable to skewed distributions.
Quantile regression is also very useful when extremes are interesting or when the response variance varies with the predictors.
Das, K., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2019) Points of significance: Quantile regression. Nature Methods 16:451–452.
Background reading
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2015) Points of significance: Simple linear regression. Nature Methods 12:999–1000.
Analyzing outliers: Robust methods to the rescue
Robust regression generates more reliable estimates by detecting and downweighting outliers.Outliers can degrade the fit of linear regression models when the estimation is performed using the ordinary least squares. The impact of outliers can be mitigated with methods that provide robust inference and greater reliability in the presence of anomalous values.
We discuss MM-estimation and show how it can be used to keep your fitting sane and reliable.
Greco, L., Luta, G., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2019) Points of significance: Analyzing outliers: Robust methods to the rescue. Nature Methods 16:275–276.
Background reading
Altman, N. & Krzywinski, M. (2016) Points of significance: Analyzing outliers: Influential or nuisance. Nature Methods 13:281–282.
Two-level factorial experiments
To find which experimental factors have an effect, simultaneously examine the difference between the high and low levels of each.Two-level factorial experiments, in which all combinations of multiple factor levels are used, efficiently estimate factor effects and detect interactions—desirable statistical qualities that can provide deep insight into a system.
They offer two benefits over the widely used one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) experiments: efficiency and ability to detect interactions.
Since the number of factor combinations can quickly increase, one approach is to model only some of the factorial effects using empirically-validated assumptions of effect sparsity and effect hierarchy. Effect sparsity tells us that in factorial experiments most of the factorial terms are likely to be unimportant. Effect hierarchy tells us that low-order terms (e.g. main effects) tend to be larger than higher-order terms (e.g. two-factor or three-factor interactions).
Smucker, B., Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2019) Points of significance: Two-level factorial experiments Nature Methods 16:211–212.
Background reading
Krzywinski, M. & Altman, N. (2014) Points of significance: Designing comparative experiments.. Nature Methods 11:597–598.
Happy 2019 `\pi` Day—
Digits, internationally
Celebrate `\pi` Day (March 14th) and set out on an exploration explore accents unknown (to you)!
This year is purely typographical, with something for everyone. Hundreds of digits and hundreds of languages.
A special kids' edition merges math with color and fat fonts.
Check out art from previous years: 2013 `\pi` Day and 2014 `\pi` Day, 2015 `\pi` Day, 2016 `\pi` Day, 2017 `\pi` Day and 2018 `\pi` Day.
Tree of Emotional Life
One moment you're :) and the next you're :-.
Make sense of it all with my Tree of Emotional life—a hierarchical account of how we feel.
Find and snap to colors in an image
One of my color tools, the colorsnap application snaps colors in an image to a set of reference colors and reports their proportion.
Below is Times Square rendered using the colors of the MTA subway lines.
Colors used by the New York MTA subway lines.
