Introducing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), or Initial Data Analysis (IDA), is an approach to data analysis that attempts to maximize insight into data. This includes assessing the quality and structure of the data, calculating summary or descriptive statistics, and plotting appropriate graphs. It can uncover underlying structures and suggest how the data should be modeled. Furthermore, EDA helps us detect outliers, errors, and anomalies in our data, and deciding what to do about such data is often more important than other, more sophisticated analysis. EDA enables us to test our underlying assumptions, discover clusters and other patterns in our data, and identify the possible relationships between various variables. A careful EDA process is vital to understanding the data and is sometimes sufficient to reveal such poor data quality that using...