Where to Go from Here - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 631

STATISTICS
Finally, remember that regardless of application, the goal is to understand
data, and when it comes to designing for an audience, it's to help others
understand. You can get a lot out of visualization, and often, it's all that you
need to figure out what your data is about.
However, as your data grows more complex in size, dimensions, and granular-
ity, visualization only gets you part of the way there. After all, there are only
so many pixels on a screen, and eventually you run out of space. Statistics is
helpful in dealing with sparse and missing data, too.
“For big data: Visualisation is fundamentally limited by the number of
pixels you can pump to a screen. If you have big data, you have way
more data than pixels, so you have to summarise your data. Statistics
gives you lots of really good tools for this.”
—Hadley Wickham
When I tell people that I'm a statistician, their gut reaction is to tell me how
much they hated their introduction to statistics course in college. But before
your eyes roll out of your head as hypothesis testing and bell curves run
through your imagination, trust me that statistics is a lot more than that. At
the very least, it provides you with a wider point of view for what your data is
about and how to sift through the text files and databases of numbers. Plus,
it's another tool to have in your back pocket.
Most schools offer statistics courses, but some open education sources also
have a few offerings:
u Coursera, https://www.coursera.org/
u Udacity, http://www.udacity.com/
WRAPPING UP
I learned to cook the summer before my second year of college. I knew how
to make only rice, which is a standard for most Asian children, and how to