Exploratory Data Analysis: A First Look
Ronald K. Pearson · 2018
The notion of exploratory data analysis is introduced in Chapter 1 , but this chapter is one of two that provide more detailed discussions of the key concepts on which it is based, with some simple illustrative examples. The chapter begins with a discussion of explorig a new dataset, employing the ProfileDataFrame function from the ExploreTheData companion R package. Important variable types are introduced (e.g., numeric, ordinal, and nominal) and their practical importance is discussed briefly, followed by discussions and illustrations of the advantages and limitations of simple data characterizations like the mean and standard deviation. Mathematics is kept to a minimum, but some is necessary to introduce important practical ideas like the Gaussian distribution, confidence intervals, and correlation measures. The chapter concludes with 10 exercises.