heights {psych}R Documentation

A data.frame of the Galton (1888) height and cubit data set.

Description

Francis Galton introduced the 'co-relation' in 1888 with a paper discussing how to measure the relationship between two variables. His primary example was the relationship between height and forearm length. The data table (cubits) is taken from Galton (1888). Unfortunately, there seem to be some errors in the original data table in that the marginal totals do not match the table.

The data frame, heights, is converted from this table using table2df.

Usage

data(heights)

Format

A data frame with 348 observations on the following 2 variables.

height

Height in inches

cubit

Forearm length in inches

Details

Sir Francis Galton (1888) published the first demonstration of the correlation coefficient. The regression (or reversion to mediocrity) of the height to the length of the left forearm (a cubit) was found to .8. The original table cubits is taken from Galton (1888). There seem to be some errors in the table as published in that the row sums do not agree with the actual row sums. These data are used to create a matrix using table2matrix for demonstrations of analysis and displays of the data.

Source

Galton (1888)

References

Galton, Francis (1888) Co-relations and their measurement. Proceedings of the Royal Society. London Series,45,135-145,

See Also

table2matrix, table2df, cubits, ellipses, galton

Examples

data(heights)
ellipses(heights,n=1,main="Galton's co-relation data set")


[Package psych version 1.7.8 ]