Statistical Graphics : Developments from Statistical Practice into Statistical

Graphical methods have entered the mainstream of both statistical applications and research in statistical methodology. This development is due in part to the revolution in computing and in part to the stimulating ideas of exploratory data analysis, but the main reason is simply that graphical methods work. Appropriately chosen plots reveal much about the data, and people who start to use them in statistical applications tend to keep using them. In addition to the many applications of statistical graphics, there is also a large and rapidly growing research literature on statistical methods that use graphics. Recent years have seen statistical graphics discussed in complete books (for example, Chambers et al. 1983; Cleveland 1985,1991) and in collections of papers (Tukey 1988; Cleveland and McGill, 1988). An indication of the widespread interest in statistical graphics beyond the statistical community is that this subject was chosen for an article in an encyclopedia intended for a general technical audience (Landwehr, 1990). A new research journal supported by the American Statistical Association, the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics has been announced and will debut soon. Graphical methods also seem to be gaining importance in statistical education at all levels. One reason for this trend is the increasing role of real-data applications as part of statistical education, since graphical methods are valuable for analysing these data sets. This paper discusses several current topics in the areas of statistical graphics research and applications and suggests additional ways that graphical methods can be used to improve statistical education. Section 2 offers a few comments on past developments in statistical graphics and its role in the practice of statistics today. Section 3 briefly mentions four areas of