TODAY’S DATA LENS

Same summary. Four different shapes.

Square soft-grey, black and red Today’s Data Lens card showing Anscombe’s quartet as four small scatter plots on the same scales, alongside their near-identical summary statistics and regression lines.

Observation

Anscombe’s quartet contains four datasets of 11 points. To the precision usually reported, they share essentially the same means and variances, correlation (about 0.816) and linear regression line (y ≈ 3 + 0.5x). Plot them and the structures are visibly different: one roughly linear, one curved, one with an outlier, and one dominated by a high-leverage point.

The summary matched. The shapes didn’t.