[BlindRUG] newbie question about seeing relationships between variables

[Erhardt, Robert]

Mike,
There was a blind student in my class and she used the BrailleR pakage.
You wrap hist() in the function VI(), as in

x=runif(50,0,10)
VI(hist(x))
VI(boplot(x))

If you try something else, like
VI(summary(x))
it simply "prints" the object.  As for visualizing summaries, in my class
we printed a few scatterplots using a Braille embosser, but the student
found this tedious and it wasn't something she could do herself.  So, she
preferred to 1.) compute the correlation between x and y, 2.) fit a few
linear models (including adding terms like x^2, x^3, etc.), and 3.) and
explore subsets of x and y as you described, to get a sense of the
relationship.  Combing all information she was able to get a good sense of
the relationship.  Beyond that, she'd simply ask others to describe the
scatterplot that R visually displays.

Hope this helps!
Rob Erhardt

On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 5:59 PM, Mike Gorse via BlindRUG <blindrug at nfbnet.org
> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> First of all, thanks for the list and for the work to make R easier to
> use! It's good that some people write statistics software and work to make
> it more accessible, so that other people can maybe learn to do things like
> analyze realtime bus data, so that other people can get around the city
> more easily...
>
> I'm very new to R and to statistics in general, so maybe there's an easy
> answer to this that I don't know about. I'm starting a Coursera course on
> statistics and data analysis, and the course had a lab that involved
> investigating some survey data. In a few places, it advised generating a
> plot in order to see the relationship between two variables, but I'm blind,
> meaning that I can't see, meaning that I can't see the nice plots that R
> generates for me. Eventually I figured out that I could more or less do
> what I needed to do by subseting the data set based on the explanatory
> variable, taking summaries of the response variable for the different
> subsets, and comparing the results, but I'm curious whether this is the
> best way to do it / what other people would do in order to get an idea of
> the relationship between two variables in a data set.
>
> Also, when I run
> library("BrailleR")
> I get a message saying that hist and boxplot are masked from
> package:graphics, so it looks as though BrailleR has its own
> implementation/wrapper for boxplot, but, when I call boxplot(), it seems to
> behave the same as it would if BrailleR weren't loaded (ie, put a boxplot
> on the screen). Is there something else that it should be doing? I don't
> see any new files being generated in my working directory (I'm not sure if
> I should expect them or not).
>
> Thanks,
> -Mike
>
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>
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>



-- 
Dr. Rob Erhardt
Asst. Professor of Mathematics
Wake Forest University
http://users.wfu.edu/erhardrj/
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