Because these are faces rather than abstract geometric shapes, be careful what you show with this method and who you show it to. Now that’s a pretty big assumption, but debate aside, they’re fun to make.ġ.
The assumption is that we can read people’s faces easily in real life, so we should be able to recognize small differences when they represent data. The point of Chernoff faces is to display multiple variables at once by positioning parts of the human face, such as ears, hair, eyes, and nose, based on numbers in a dataset. This tutorial describes how to apply Chernoff faces to your own data.
This wasn’t the first time someone’s asked how to make Chernoff faces, so I did a quick search. I was wondering, have you ever considered doing a Chernoff faces tutorial for R? I think Chernoff faces are pretty interesting and I haven’t seen much about them on the web.
