Structure in Data

Abstract

A major objective in data analysis is to identify interesting features or structure in the data. The graphical methods are very useful in discovering structure. There are basically two ways of thinking about "structure". One has to do with counts of observations. In this approach, patterns in the density are the features of interest. We may be interested in whether the density is multimodal, whether it is skewed, whether there are holes in the density, and so on.