[R] father and son heights

Marc Schwartz MSchwartz at medanalytics.com
Sun Feb 15 20:21:19 CET 2004


On Sun, 2004-02-15 at 12:37, Ann Loraine wrote:
> Actually, no.  It's a data set that is used to teach Pearson's 
> correlation coefficient in a popular statistics textbook - "Statistics" 
> by Freedman, Pisani, et al.
> 
> It contains over a thousand measurements of son's and their father's 
> heights.
> 
> I would like to find it in electronic form so that I can use it to 
> prepare figures and examples for a lecture.
> 
> If anyone knows where I could find it, please let me know.  I've done a 
> few Google searches but haven't had any luck so far.  I also used the 
> data() command to look through R's built-in data sets and couldn't find 
> it.  Any suggestions would be most welcome!
> 
> Yours,
> 
> Ann Loraine
> 
> 
> On Feb 15, 2004, at 5:46 AM, Spencer Graves wrote:
> 
> >      Do you have this data set in any form?  If yes, do you have it in 
> > any electronic form?  If yes, have you tried following relevant 
> > suggestions in the manual on "R Data Import/Export"?  [I got this as a 
> > hot link from within R 1.8.1 "help.start()".]
> >
> >      hope this helps.
> >      spencer graves
> >
> > Ann Loraine wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Hello,
> >>
> >> I'm looking for Pearson's father and son height data.
> >>
> >> Is this data set available in R?
> >>
> >> Thanks!
> >>
> >> Ann Loraine


Found it here:

http://stat-www.berkeley.edu/users/juliab/141C/pearson.dat

It consists of 1,078 pairs of father (col 1) and son (col 2) paired
data.  Used to not only show Pearson correlation, but also used to
demonstrate Regression to the Mean, or as Galton called it, Regression
Towards Mediocrity.

You can save the page as a text file, then read it into R via
read.table().

HTH,

Marc Schwartz




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