First Tools for Looking at Data

Abstract

The single most important question for a working scientist—perhaps the single most useful question anyone can ask—is: “what’s going on here?” Answering this question requires creative use of different ways to make pictures of datasets, to summarize them, and to expose whatever structure might be there. This is an activity that is sometimes known as “Descriptive Statistics”. There isn’t any fixed recipe for understanding a dataset, but there is a rich variety of tools we can use to get insights.