Karl Pearson studied the relationship between the heights of men and their adult sons, similar to research done by his colleague Francis Galton. Pearson’s original data was measured and rounded to the nearest inch. The authors of an introductory statistics textbook added a small amount of random uniform noise “to render it continuous”—but not large enough to fundamentally change its meaning.
father: father’s height in inchesson: son’s height in inchesRows: 1,078
Columns: 2
$ father <dbl> 65.0, 63.3, 65.0, 65.8, 61.1, 63.0, 65.4, 64.7, 66.1, 67.0, 59.…
$ son <dbl> 59.8, 63.2, 63.3, 62.8, 64.3, 64.2, 64.1, 64.0, 64.6, 64.0, 65.…# A tibble: 6 × 2
father son
<dbl> <dbl>
1 65 59.8
2 63.3 63.2
3 65 63.3
4 65.8 62.8
5 61.1 64.3
6 63 64.2Random Services: Pearson’s Height Data
Pearson: Heights of Fathers and Sons
Pearson, Karl and Lee, Alice. (1903). On the laws of inheritance in man. Biometrika, 2, pp. 357-462.
Freedman, David, Pisani, Robert, and Purves Roger. (2007). Statistics (4th ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.