Chernoff Faces

In the 1970's, a Harvard Statistics professor (who is still in the dept, btw) Herman Chernoff introduced a way to visualize multivariate data, taking advantage of the fact that human visual perception is especially sensitive to changes in facial expression. Just for reference, we can visualize 3-variate data in the x-y-z plane with some difficulty and there is virtually no way to visualize data with more than 3 variables in the traditional Cartesian sense. However, by using facial features to represent variables, we can more or less understand subtle changes in 3 or more variables at once. Check out the following old school visualization about life in LA using Chernoff faces:

http://go.owu.edu/~jbkrygie/krygier_html/geog_353/geog_353_lo/geog_353_lo11_gr/turner_chernoff.jpg