Galton's Peas

Description

Francis Galton introduced the correlation coefficient with an analysis of the similarities of the parent and child generation of 700 sweet peas.

Usage

data(peas)

Format

A data frame with 700 observations on the following 2 variables.

parent

The mean diameter of the mother pea for 700 peas

child

The mean diameter of the daughter pea for 700 sweet peas

Details

Galton's introduction of the correlation coefficient was perhaps the most important contribution to the study of individual differences. This data set allows a graphical analysis of the data set. There are two different graphic examples. One shows the regression lines for both relationships, the other finds the correlation as well.

Source

Stanton, Jeffrey M. (2001) Galton, Pearson, and the Peas: A brief history of linear regression for statistics intstructors, Journal of Statistics Education, 9. (retrieved from the web from http://www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v9n3/stanton.html) reproduces the table from Galton, 1894, Table 2.

The data were generated from this table.

References

Galton, Francis (1877) Typical laws of heredity. paper presented to the weekly evening meeting of the Royal Institution, London. Volume VIII (66) is the first reference to this data set. The data appear in

Galton, Francis (1894) Natural Inheritance (5th Edition), New York: MacMillan).

See Also

The other Galton data sets: heights, galton,cubits

Examples

data(peas)
pairs.panels(peas,lm=TRUE,xlim=c(14,22),ylim=c(14,22),main="Galton's Peas")
describe(peas)
pairs.panels(peas,main="Galton's Peas")