Using data visualization to identify data outliers

Visualizations enable business professionals and companies to make sense of the numbers and deliver insights. They also make it easier to spot data outliers, as we will see in this section. Identifying outliers is important since they can significantly affect how you interpret the data and what actions you take. We can ask, Is this data point correct?, Is there insight from this?, or Could this be a potentially fraudulent transaction? In this section, we will visualize data outliers using Microsoft Power BI and Tableau through a scatter chart and a histogram.

Continuing our example from Chapter 5, Using Business Intelligence Tools to Fix Data Integrity Issues, about column distribution, let’s further analyze the dataset for 2020_Transactions.xlsx and review the sales quantity.

Figure 6.6 – Information about the column statistics and value distribution of the column

When we select the Quantity...