Exploratory Data Analysis

Exploratory data analysis (EDA) is an important item in the toolbox of statistics that is often used at the beginning of any data analysis workflow. Its purpose is to ensure that the data is “in good shape,” to obtain an overview of the content of the dataset, and to characterize the data using simple mathematical measures as well as data visualization. This chapter starts by explaining the goals and the corresponding methods. This is followed by introducing two steps that should be the first ones before any “proper” EDA begins: the initial exploration of the data files as well as a quick initial visualization. Subsequently, we introduce descriptive statistics and explorative data visualization as the two main constituents of EDA.