Look at the Data First! - Anscombe’s Dataset
| Objective: | When fitting a function to data, the student MUST first plot the data, and this activity shows why. F.J. Anscombe invented these datasets to demonstrate the importance of graphing the data before finding the correlation and line of regression. Collectively they present a very striking picture. |
| Materials: | Two OHT masters. |
| Time: | 10 minutes |
| Instructions: | Briefly discuss the importance of plotting the bi-variate data on a scatterplot before doing any analysis. These four datasets should convince the most sceptical student. |
Source: Anscombe, F.J., Graphs in Statistical Analysis, American Statistican, 27, 17-21
Note that the following two pages are OHT masters, hence the large font size. They can be either printed, or saved as html and then opened in a word processor that supports the html format. Saving a web page which contains a table as a text file is not recommended.