Visual Data Exploration

Visual data exploration is a mandatory intial step whether or not more formal analysis follows. When combined with descriptive statistics, visualization provides an effective way to identify summaries, structure, relationships, differences, and abnormalities in the data. Often times no elaborate analysis is necessary as all the important conclusions required for a decision are evident from simple visual examination of the data. Other times, data exploration will be used to help guide the data cleaning, feature selection, and sampling process. Regardless, visual data exploration is about investigating the characteristics of your data set. To do this, we typically create numerous plots in an interactive fashion. This tutorial will show you how to create plots that answer some of the fundamental questions we typically have of our data.