V.N. Vimal Rao, PhD student in the Department of Educational Psychology’s quantitative methods in education program, has been given an honorable mention by the Consortium for the Advancement of Statistics Education (CAUSE) for his interpretation of its January 2022 cartoon, drawn by British cartoonist John Landers.

Each month CAUSE releases a new cartoon, and statistics students to suggest statistical captions. The caption contest is offered as a fun way to get students thinking independently about statistical concepts. 

CAUSE describes its January 2022 cartoon as featuring, “children playing on a jungle-gym with a flagpole and some birds in a tree in the background. The flagpole and the top of the jungle gym appear to form the axes of a scatterplot where the birds are the points with male (red) cardinals in a downward pattern and female (brown) cardinals in an upward pattern.”

According to CAUSE, Rao’s caption to the cartoon, “Regression trees aren’t just for the birds,” discusses how relationships between variables might be expressed and communicated by classification and regression tree models.

Get more information on the CAUSE contest and see the cartoon.