A compilation of comics explaining statistics, data science, and machine learning

Many (academic) talks or lectures I attend nowadays motivate the central question with a (sometimes humorous) comic strip, perhaps influenced by the fact that there?s always a relevant xkcd; unfortunately, everyone seems to have converged to using the same (small) set of comics, and I?m no exception.

Here, I try to rectify the issue by compiling a larger set of comics that you can use instead. I limit it to comics that explain some relevant concept. There are many more comic strips that mention, use, or relate to these topics.

Note: I didn?t get this list by myself; I used both existing compilations and crowd-sourced more from friends.

Note 2: Of course, this?ll become out-of-date immediately. Feel free to send me comics or link to them through the comments.

Note 3: The categorization below is rough. Of course many of the categories/comics overlap.

Note 4: Medium?s hot-linking of images doesn?t seem to work very well unfortunately. Links to original source included in caption.

Correlation and causation

https://xkcd.com/552/https://xkcd.com/925/

Prediction, summarization, and interpretation

https://xkcd.com/605/https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2328#comichttps://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2015-02-02https://xkcd.com/2048/https://xkcd.com/1725/ ? Note: I?m not a huge fan of this one; regression with low R has value in certain cases.

Experimentation

https://xkcd.com/882/https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/empirical-economicshttps://xkcd.com/1478/. Note ? if it isn?t obvious: this is not a guide.

Conditional Expectation

https://xkcd.com/795/https://www.mrlovenstein.com/comic/608https://xkcd.com/1132/. Note ? at least one prominent statistician doesn?t like this cartoon (https://andrewgelman.com/2012/11/10/16808/).https://xkcd.com/1236/https://xkcd.com/2059/http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-01-24

Sampling and randomness

http://dilbert.com/strip/2001-10-25https://www.treelobsters.com/2009/08/76-dumb-luck.htmlhttp://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1271

Understanding your methods and application; data manipulation

https://xkcd.com/1838/https://xkcd.com/1831/https://marketoonist.com/http://dilbert.com/strip/2008-05-07http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-07-02