Chapter 3. Exploratory Data Analysis
One way to learn new things is through discovery. Exploratory data analysis is a term attributed to the statistician John Tukey in a book of the same name (Tukey, 1977). Exploratory data analysis means examining a dataset to discover its underlying characteristics with an emphasis on visualization. It helps you during analysis design to determine if you should gather more data, suggest hypotheses to test, and identify models to develop. In this chapter, we will cover the following four topics related to exploratory data analysis:
- Understanding exploratory data analysis
- Analyzing a single data variable
- Analyzing two variables together
- Exploring multiple variables simultaneously
You will learn common techniques that statisticians and analysts use to characterize data. These include tabular and graphical methods to explore the dataset. There are many interesting things to discover in a dataset, but in business or science you are exploring to determine...
