Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Chernoff Faces

For those interested in visulaisation, "Chernoff Faces" display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty.

1 comment:

Kevin Denny said...

Its an interesting idea, I wonder how it works in practice given that faces have such emotional valency. In the evolutionary psychology literature there is a lot of stuff on preference for symmetric faces as an "honest signal" of mate quality for example.