Data, Exploratory Analysis, and R
Ronald K. Pearson · 2018
This chapter presents a brief overview of the book, beginning with the question of why we analyze data and giving a specific example, based on an insurance dataset available in R , that illustrates a number of key ideas discussed in later chapters. This example is followed by short discussions of the topics listed in the book&s;s title: data and the working definition adoped in this book as a rectangular array of observed values, the basic notion of exploratory data analysis as a systematic way of looking at data to identify important features and possible anomalies and errors, and a very brief introduction to computers, software, and the R programming language. The companion R package ExploreTheData is introduced and briefly described, and the chapter concludes with a summary outline of the book. There are no exercises at the end of this chapter.