Anscombe’s quartet was mentioned in a discussion on the Political Methodology listserv, as to what journalists need to know to stop looking like idiots when they report on social science research:
Counter to your intuition, all four sets of data have the exact same descriptive and bivariate statistics:
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Mean of x in each case | 9 (exact) |
| Sample variance of x in each case | 11 (exact) |
| Mean of y in each case | 7.50 (to 2 decimal places) |
| Sample variance of y in each case | 4.122 or 4.127 (to 3 decimal places) |
| Correlation between x and y in each case | 0.816 (to 3 decimal places) |
| Linear regression line in each case | y = 3.00 + 0.500x (to 2 and 3 decimal places, respectively) |
Source: Wikipedia
