In order to gain knowledge from data, it's important to understand the structure behind a dataset. The way we represent a dataset can make it more intuitive to work with in a certain way, and consequently, easier to draw insights from it. The law of the instrument states that when holding a hammer, everything seems like a nail (based on Andrew Maslow's The Psychology of Science, 1966) and is about the tendency to adapt jobs to the available tools. There is no silver bullet, however, as all methods have their drawbacks given the problem at hand. It's therefore important to know the basic methods in the arsenal of available tools in order to recognize the situations where we should use a hammer as supposed to a screwdriver.
In this chapter, we'll look at different ways of representing data, be it visualizing customer groups...