The fundamentals of ESDA
Mapmaking, also known as cartography, is the first step in ESDA. Mapmaking is a blending of art and science. It is an art form in that you’re taking data and representing it in a visual format that is easy to interpret and derive meaning from. Representing data in a visual format is critical for the understanding of both technical and non-technical stakeholders. It is science in that the visuals must be derived from data and they must honor the underlying metadata such as the coordinate reference systems from which they were collected.
Mapmaking is not a standard practice in more traditional EDA, which is traditionally focused on understanding basic statistics of the data such as mean and standard deviation. EDA also focuses on understanding the distribution of the data, dealing with missing data, identifying outliers, and understanding the correlations among variables. In this chapter, you’ll work with data and will be conducting the work...
