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Note 2: Of course, this’ll become out-of-date immediately.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.
Prediction, summarization, and interpretation





Experimentation



Conditional Expectation






Sampling and randomness



Understanding your methods and application; data manipulation




