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John W. Tukey’s work on interactive graphics. (English) Zbl 1019.62002

Summary: If there ever was a tool that could stimulate the imagination and profit from the intuition and creativity of John Tukey, it was computer graphics. John always saw graphics a being central to exploratory data analysis: “Since the aim of exploratory data analysis is to learn what seems to be, it should be no surprise that pictures play a vital role in doing it well. There is nothing better than a picture for making you think of questions you had forgotten to ask (even mentally).” Much of his work focused on static displays designed to be easily drawn by hand, but he realized that if one wanted to effectively explore multivariate data, computer graphics would be an ideal tool. PRIM-9, the first program to use interactive, dynamic graphics for viewing and dissecting multivariate data, was conceived by John during a four month visit to the Computation Research Group of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in early 1972. PRIM-9 opened up a fundamentally new way of exploring multivariate data. Its basic operations – Picturing, Rotation, Isolation and Masking – have stood the test of time and form the core of numerous follow-on systems.
John’s experiences with PRIM-9 gave rise to a slew of other ideas for the analysis of multivariate data, many of them not tied to interactive graphics. The most well known of those is “Projection Pursuit” – automatically finding interesting low-dimensional projections of multivariate data by optimizing a projection index. John was also keenly interested in ways of detecting and modeling nonlinear structures in multivariate data which might not be manifest in projections, such as concentration of data near nonlinear lower dimensional manifolds. Many of his proposals exist only in the form of handwritten notes and appear “far out” even today.
John’s work on Prim-9 and Projection Pursuit lent respectability to computationally oriented, non mathematical research in statistics. He moved the center of gravity away from an (over)emphasis on mathematical theory to a greater balance between methodology, theory, and applications and thereby helped revitalize the discipline of statistics.

MSC:

62A09 Graphical methods in statistics
62-07 Data analysis (statistics) (MSC2010)
01A70 Biographies, obituaries, personalia, bibliographies
62-03 History of statistics
62H30 Classification and discrimination; cluster analysis (statistical aspects)

Biographic References:

Tukey, J. W.
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References:

[1] BECKER, R. A., CLEVELAND, W. S. and SHy U, M. J. (1996). The visual design and control of trellis display. J. Comput. Graph. Statist. 5 123-155.
[2] BUJA, A. (1983). Multidimensional scaling in a new environment. Sound film, 30 minutes. Bin-88 Productions, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
[3] FISHERKELLER, M. A., FRIEDMAN, J. H. and TUKEY, J. W. (1974a). PRIM-9, an interactive multidimensional data display and analysis sy stem, 1974. Sound film, 25 minutes. Bin-88 Productions, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Video tape available through the ASA Video Library.
[4] FISHERKELLER, M. A., FRIEDMAN, J. H. and TUKEY, J. W. (1974b). PRIM-9, an interactive multidimensional data display and analysis sy stem. In Proceedings of the Pacific ACM Regional Conference. [Also in The Collected Works of John W. Tukey V (1988) 307-327.]
[5] FRIEDMAN, J. H. and STUETZLE, W. (1981). Projection pursuit regression. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 76 817-823. JSTOR: · doi:10.2307/2287576
[6] FRIEDMAN, J. H. and STUETZLE, W. (1982). Projection pursuit methods for data analysis. In Modern Data Analy sis (A. F. Siegel and R. L. Launer, eds.). Academic Press, New York.
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[8] FRIEDMAN, J. H. and TUKEY, J. W. (1974). A projection pursuit algorithm for exploratory data analysis. IEEE Trans. Comput. 23 881-890. · Zbl 0284.68079 · doi:10.1109/T-C.1974.224051
[9] FRIEDMAN, J. H., TUKEY, J. W. and TUKEY, P. A. (1980). Approaches to analysis of data that concentrate near intermediate-dimensional manifolds. In Data Analy sis and Informatics (E. Diday, L. Lebart, J. T. Pages and R. Tomassone, eds.) 3-13. North-Holland, Amsterdam. · Zbl 0474.68097
[10] HUBER, P. J. (1985). Projection pursuit (with discussion). Ann. Statist. 13 435-525. · Zbl 0595.62059 · doi:10.1214/aos/1176349519
[11] MCDONALD, J. A., FRIEDMAN, J. H. and STUETZLE, W. (1982a). Exploring data with the orion1 workstation. Sound film, 25 minutes. Bin-88 Productions, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
[12] MCDONALD, J. A., FRIEDMAN, J. H. and STUETZLE, W. (1982b). Projection pursuit regression. Sound film, 25 minutes. Bin-88 Productions, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
[13] SWAy NE, D. F., COOK, D. and BUJA, A. (1998). XGobi: Interactive dy namic data visualization in the X Window Sy stem. J. Comput. Graph. Statist. 7 113-130.
[14] TURKEY, J. W. (1972). How computing and statistics affect each other. In The Babbage Memorial Meeting: Report of Proceedings 21-37. The British Computer Society and The Roy al Statistical Society, London.
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[16] TUKEY, J. W. (1982). Another look at the future. In Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 14th Sy mposium on the Interface (K. W. Heiner, R. S. Sacher and J. W. Wilkinson, eds.) 2-8. Springer, New York.
[17] TUKEY, J. W. (1988). Control and stash philosophy for two-handed, flexible, and immediate control of a graphic display. In Dy namic Graphics for Statistics (W. S. Cleveland and · Zbl 0701.62013
[18] TUKEY, J. W. and TUKEY, P. A. (1982). Some graphics for studying four-dimensional data. In Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 14th Sy mposium on the Interface (K.W. Heiner, R.S. Sacher and J.W. Wilkinson, eds.) 60-66. Springer, New York.
[19] TUKEY, J. W. and TUKEY, P. A. (1985). Computer graphics and explaoratory data analysis: An introduction. In Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference and Exposition: Computer Graphics’85 3 773-785. National Computer Graphics Association, Fairfax, VA.
[20] TUKEY, P. A. and TUKEY, J. W. (1981). Graphical display of data sets in three or more dimensions. In Interpreting Multivariate Data (V. Barnett, ed.) 189-275. Wiley, Chichester. · Zbl 0597.62002
[21] STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 94305 E-MAIL: jhf@stat.stanford.edu STATISTICS DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON SEATTLE, WASHINGTON 98195 E-MAIL: wxs@stat.washington.edu
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