Introducing the Iris Dataset

We will use a single example dealing with three species of the iris flower. This data comes from a famous experiment on a series of measurements of three species of iris flowers. R A Fisher, a statistically minded thinker in the early twentieth centure used this dataset in his 1936 paper The Use of multiple measurements in taxonomic problems, published in the Annals of Eugenics. We will begin by using this data to investigate some basic questions one might have about the data. These questions will not be limited to this dataset however, and we must note that there is some kind of relationship to Eugenics in the taxonomic problem for Fisher.