# Making sense of scatter plots

I had a recent question which I probably should re-formulate to a more general one.

I came across this: Using scatter plots to understand multiple values of Y for a given X and thought the accepted answer was very good, but what's unclear to me is: given a nasty scatter plot, how would you visually get the idea what sort of relationship the x:es and y:s have? In my mind, there's no way of telling if a linear, quadratic, etc regression is appropriate.

If we look at the plot that is currently confounding me:

My idea was to somehow plot the AVERAGE of f(x), with x clumped together in intervals, instead of each observation. Is this how you would go about it? If not, what other way do you visually make sense of this data?

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Just an observation on your particular plot, but the y values appear to fixed at integer intervals. If the y values are known to be accurate you only need regression on the x values. Or to look at it another way, as in Glen_b's bins example, you already have bins. I'm no expert on this stuff though. –  Jaydee Jul 31 '14 at 15:27

You might want to consider a lowess (/loess) or similar local smooth.

consider:

This one was generated in R with scatter.smooth. It's an estimate of the local mean, but in a way that they vary smoothly; directly akin to using a kernel density estimate instead of a histogram.

If you must have bins, see here which describes how to do something like this regressogram (bin smoother):

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Very interesting! I think your answer in the other question was what I was looking for here aswell though. –  Benjamin Lindqvist Jul 31 '14 at 12:30
+1 - a slight amount of jitter and making the points smaller and semi-transparent in the original plot would make it more informative as well (which takes minimal data manipulation). I can't figure out the precision of the values on the x-axis - but they already appear to be "clumped together" as the circles overlap exactly. –  Andy W Jul 31 '14 at 16:24
@AndyW By 'original plot', I presume you mean the one in the question (I didn't attempt to reproduce that aspect of the x-variable); I agree completely with your thoughts about making the plot more informative. –  Glen_b Jul 31 '14 at 16:54
Yes I meant the plot in Benjamin's question. –  Andy W Jul 31 '14 at 17:15