What’s the Matter With Chernoff Faces?:
In 1976 statistician Herman Chernoff had the idea of representing multivariate data in figures now known as Chernoff Faces. The theory is that since we are highly practiced in the art of facial recognition, and can discern minute variations in features and expression, perhaps encoding data in a likeness of a human face would reveal things that, say, a bar graph wouldn’t. And reading the diagram would, ideally, be as natural as interpreting the face of your best friend. As an example, here are some team statistics from the 2005 baseball season represented in a table and then as a series of Chernoff Faces
