Chernoff face

A Chernoff face displays multi-dimensional data in the form a “human” face. Degrees of freedom in the face’s composition (e.g. size and position of parts like the nose, eyes, etc) correspond to certain values of variables in the underlying dataset.

It’s certainly an interesting way to visualize a set of data points, but I don’t think it’s used very often as a serious method of conveying information. One has to be quite careful when selecting how parts of the face change w.r.t. to changes in the underlying data; us humans are rather sensitive to faces and can be easily mislead if certain types of facial structure emerge unexpectedly. But again, it seems more like an experimental visualization technique in most contexts and less of a formal, commonly employed data visualization method used to inform an audience.