Summarization

Let's return to our bicycle parts manufacturing organization example. Suppose we have a new file of transactions and this time we have more data and our efforts are going to be focused on performing a statistical analysis with the intention of identifying specifics that may be contributing to the sales performance reported as part of the preceding activities.

Step one a summarization of the data. The previous section already presented some groupings: products and periods. Using those components, we were able to be telling the story of the organization's sales performance.

What other groupings or categories might be within the data?

For example, if we theorize that sales performance is dependent upon a period of time, the first thing to do is probably to group the data into time periods. Standard time periods are, of course, month, quarter, and year (and we already did that in a prior section), but statistically speaking, the more data the better, so a better time grouping might...