Thursday, December 8, 2016
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM (ET)
Palamountain Hall Gannett Lobby
Event Type
Reception
Contact
Department
Mathematics & Computer Science
Link
http://ems.skidmore.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=15658
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.