I’ve been looking around to find a Ruby plotting library in order
to play with some data. The scientific community has gathered more
around Python, and it seems like Ruby has a ways to go before catching up.
It took some digging, but I’ve settled on Gruff, which seems
to be a well-maintined plotting tool.

I’m also starting to look at the Introduction to Statistical Learning course offered online
by Stanford. I think the textbook and lectures are excellent, though
admittedly I’ve been following the textbook more closely than the lectures.

My goal is to do everything in Ruby, since I like Ruby so much!

There is a free online textbook for the course, and all the data is available
on the textbook’s website.

I like this textbook, because in addition to being pedagogical, the authors chose R
as the language to showcase statistical techniques.

To start things off, I used gruff to graph one of the first datasets, Advertising.csv.

Here is the graph (click for larger version):

Advertising scatter plot

And the code to produce the graph!