Thursday, December 8, 2016
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM (ET)
Palamountain Hall Gannett Auditorium
Event Type
Lecture
Contact
Department
Mathematics & Computer Science
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=15778
FiveThirtyEight data visualization specialist, Reuben Fischer-Baum is giving a lecture entitled, "How Should We Visualize Uncertainty?"
Conveying uncertainty is one of the most difficult tasks in data visualization. Probabilistic forecasts—especially for events that will occur only a single time—are intuitively difficult for anyone to understand, even those readers or users with strong statistical backgrounds. This puts a special impetus on visualizers to treat these topics with care.
The wake of the 2016 election, in which a Trump victory was an unlikely outcome in most major predictions, is a good moment to take stock of the techniques we’re currently using. There are no silver bullets to this visualization problem and best practices can vary with context, but this talk will walk through good and bad examples from the worlds of:
- Political predictions
- Economic and climate projections
- Weather forecasting
- Sports predictions and betting
Lecture sponsored by the Mathematics Department.