Dianne Cook is a Professor of Business Analytics, Department of Econometrics and Business Statistics.
Professor Cook is a world leader in the field of data visualisation. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Editor of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics. Her research is in data science, data visualisation, exploratory data analysis, data mining, high-dimensional methods and statistical computing. She is only the second Australian and the third woman globally to be invited to join the inner circle of the prestigious R Foundation, which upholds and administers the copyright of the R language software and documentation.
Much of her work has been on developing interactive statistical graphics for high-dimensional data, and the implementation has been in these software packages: xgobi, ggobi, cranvas. The primary methods include tours, projection pursuit, manual controls for tours, pipelines for interactive graphics, a grammar of graphics for biological data, and visualizing boundaries in high-d classifiers. She has also experimented with visualising data in virtual environments, and found that people do see clusters better in that environment than on a single computer screen. Her current work focuses on bridging the gap between statistical inference and exploratory graphics.
Her work has been applied to topics as varied as drug studies, mud crab growth, climate change, educational testing, gene expression analysis, butterfly populations in Yellowstone, stimulus funds spending, NRC rankings of graduate programs, technology boom and bust, election polls, soybean breeding, common crop population structures, insect gall to plant host interactions, bushfires, soccer and tennis statistics. She is currently looking at Melbourne’s pedestrian sensor data.
