[R] how to plot a distribution of mean and standard deviation

[R. Michael Weylandt]

It seems like the relevant plot would depend on what you are trying to
investigate, but usually a scatterplot would well work for bivariate
data with no other assumptions needed. I usually find ecdf() plots
rather hard to interpret without playing around with the data
elsewhere first and I'm not sure they make an enormous amount of sense
for bivariate data in your case since they reorder inputs.

Michael

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 6:51 AM, gj <gawesh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I have the following data about courses (504) in a university, two
> attributes about the proportion of resources used (#resources_used /
> #resources_available), namely the average and the standard deviation.
> Thus I have:
> [1] n=504 rows
> [2] 1 id column and 2 attributes
>
> Here's a sample of the data:
>
> courseid,average,std
> 12741,1,0
> 17161,1,0
> 12514,1,0
> 12316,0.8666666692648178,0.26090261464799325
> 2467,0.8623188442510107,0.24920700355307424
> 3047,0.85,0.2314550249431379
> 1747,0.8481481481481481,0.23078446747051584
> 2487,0.8383838455333854,        0.20429589057565342
> 13869,0.8181818181818182,0.2522624895547565
> 1706,0.8158730235364702,0.19332287915878024
> 2041,0.8095238095238095,0.24880667576405963
> 1864,0.8080808141014793,0.17456052968726046
> 2106,0.784444437623024,0.2475808839379094
> ....
> .....
>
> My question is how can I sensibly visualise this data.
>
> In this context, it does not make sense to go find the population mean
> or population std. However, what would sense is showing the cdf of the
> mean. So, I'm thinking of doing this using ecdf(). But what about the
> standard deviation? How can I include visualise the standard deviation
> as well as the mean? Would that make sense on just one plot?
>
> Any idea?
>
> Thanks
> Gawesh
>
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