Chapter 13. Basic techniques of graphical analysis
This chapter covers
- Investigating relationships
- Using logarithmic scales
- Representing point distributions
- Visualizing ranked data
- Organizing your work
This chapter and the next largely take gnuplot and its features for granted and instead concentrate on applying gnuplot to specific goals that commonly arise when graphing data. At the same time, I’ll take the opportunity to show you how certain tasks can be accomplished using gnuplot’s features. In this chapter, I’ll discuss some basic activities that are generally useful in graphical analysis; the next chapter will cover some more specialized tasks in greater depth.
When faced with a new data set, two questions usually dominate. The first is, how does one quantity depend on some other quantity—how does y vary with x? The second question (for data sets that include some form of statistical noise) asks, how is some quantity distributed—where are data points located, and what’s the character of the randomness? These are the two primary questions for this chapter. In the course of it, we’ll also revisit logarithmic plots and their uses and examine more applications of smooth approximations to noisy data sets—topics first introduced in chapter 3.