Exploratory data analysis

In statistics, exploratory data analysis (EDA) is an approach to analyzing data sets to summarize their main characteristics, often with visual methods. A statistical model can be used or not, but primarily EDA is for seeing what the data can tell us beyond the formal modeling or hypothesis testing task. Exploratory data analysis was promoted by John Tukey to encourage statisticians to explore the data, and possibly formulate hypotheses that could lead to new data collection and experiments. EDA is different from initial data analysis (IDA), which focuses more narrowly on checking assumptions required for model fitting and hypothesis testing, and handling missing values and making transformations of variables as needed. EDA encompasses IDA.

Tukey's championing of EDA encouraged the development of statistical computing packages, especially S at Bell Labs. The S programming language inspired the systems 'S'-PLUS and R. This family of statistical-computing environments featured vastly improved dynamic visualization capabilities, which allowed statisticians to identify outliers, trends and patterns in data that merited further study.

Tukey's EDA was related to two other developments in statistical theory: Robust statistics and nonparametric statistics, both of which tried to reduce the sensitivity of statistical inferences to errors in formulating statistical models. Tukey promoted the use of five number summary of numerical data—the two extremes (maximum and minimum), the median, and the quartiles—because these median and quartiles, being  functions of the empirical distribution are defined for all distributions, unlike the mean and standard deviation; moreover, the quartiles and median are more robust to skewed or heavy-tailed distributions than traditional summaries (the mean and standard deviation). The packages S, S-PLUS, and R included routines using resampling statistics, such as Quenouille and Tukey's jackknife and Efron bootstrap, which are nonparametric and robust (for many problems).

Exploratory data analysis, robust statistics, nonparametric statistics, and the development of statistical programming languages facilitated statisticians' work on scientific and engineering problems. Such problems included the fabrication of semiconductors and the understanding of communications networks, which concerned Bell Labs. These statistical developments, all championed by Tukey, were designed to complement the analytic theory of testing statistical hypotheses, particularly the Laplacian tradition's emphasis on exponential families.

EDA development
Tukey held that too much emphasis in statistics was placed on statistical hypothesis testing (confirmatory data analysis); more emphasis needed to be placed on using data to suggest hypotheses to test. In particular, he held that confusing the two types of analyses and employing them on the same set of data can lead to systematic bias owing to the issues inherent in testing hypotheses suggested by the data.

The objectives of EDA are to:
 * Suggest hypotheses about the causes of observed phenomena
 * Assess assumptions on which statistical inference will be based
 * Support the selection of appropriate statistical tools and techniques
 * Provide a basis for further data collection through surveys or experiments

Many EDA techniques have been adopted into data mining and are being taught to young students as a way to introduce them to statistical thinking.

Techniques
There are a number of tools that are useful for EDA, but EDA is characterized more by the attitude taken than by particular techniques.

Typical graphical techniques used in EDA are:


 * Box plot
 * Histogram
 * Multi-vari chart
 * Run chart
 * Pareto chart
 * Scatter plot
 * Stem-and-leaf plot
 * Parallel coordinates
 * Odds ratio
 * Multidimensional scaling
 * Targeted projection pursuit
 * Principal component analysis
 * Multilinear PCA
 * Projection methods such as grand tour, guided tour and manual tour
 * Interactive versions of these plots

Typical quantitative techniques are:


 * Median polish
 * Trimean
 * Ordination

History
Many EDA ideas can be traced back to earlier authors, for example:
 * Francis Galton emphasized order statistics and quantiles.
 * Arthur Lyon Bowley used precursors of the stemplot and five-number summary (Bowley actually used a "seven-figure summary", including the extremes, deciles and quartiles, along with the median - see his Elementary Manual of Statistics (3rd edn., 1920), p. 62 – he defines "the maximum and minimum, median, quartiles and two deciles" as the "seven positions").
 * Andrew Ehrenberg articulated a philosophy of data reduction (see his book of the same name).

The Open University course Statistics in Society (MDST 242), took the above ideas and merged them with Gottfried Noether's work, which introduced statistical inference via coin-tossing and the median test.

Example
Findings from EDA are often orthogonal to the primary analysis task. This is an example, described in more detail in. The analysis task is to find the variables which best predict the tip that a dining party will give to the waiter. The variables available are tip, total bill, gender, smoking status, time of day, day of the week and size of the party. The analysis task requires that a regression model be fit with either tip or tip rate as the response variable. The fitted model is

tip rate = 0.18 - 0.01×size

which says that as the size of the dining party increase by one person tip will decrease by 1%. Making plots of the data reveals other interesting features not described by this model.

What is learned from the graphics is different from what could be learned by the modeling. You can say that these pictures help the data tell us a story, that we have discovered some features of tipping that perhaps we didn't anticipate in advance.

Software

 * R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics
 * GGobi is a free software for interactive data visualization
 * OpenSHAPA (modern open source successor to MacSHAPA), permits analysis of various media files (e.g. video, sound).
 * CMU-DAP (Carnegie-Mellon University Data Analysis Package, FORTRAN source for EDA tools with English-style command syntax, 1977).
 * Data Applied, a comprehensive web-based data visualization and data mining environment.
 * Fathom (for high-school and intro college courses).
 * High-D for multivariate analysis using parallel coordinates.
 * JMP, an EDA package from SAS Institute.
 * KNIME Konstanz Information Miner – Open-Source data exploration platform based on Eclipse.
 * Orange, an open-source data mining software suite.
 * PanXpan, a platform on online data analysis modules.
 * SAS Visual Analytics, also from the SAS Institute, includes a web-based EDA application called SAS Visual Analytics Explorer (VAE).
 * SOCR provides a large number of free Internet-accessible.
 * TinkerPlots (for upper elementary and middle school students).
 * Tanagra is an open source data mining software for academic and research purposes. It includes exploratory data analysis.
 * VisuMap for interactive exploration of high dimensional multivariate data.
 * Weka an open source data mining package that includes visualisation and EDA tools such as targeted projection pursuit
 * curios.IT for interactive 3D exploration of high dimensional business data.