The first step in any analytics, especially IoT analytics, is getting to know your data. Like a future spouse, you need to know everything you can about it. Know its flaws and its strong points. Know which attributes can be annoying and make sure you are able to live with them. Get to know its future earning potential. And find all this out before it is too late and you are bound to it.
In this chapter, we will use a couple of tools to quickly learn quite a bit about a sample dataset. Examples will follow along with methods to dive into the data in order to find its strengths and weaknesses. For exploration and visualization, we will use Tableau. For more statistical evaluations, we will use the statistical programming language R.
