Chapter 1 Data Collection and Quality

We live in a world where data touch nearly every aspect of our lives: health care, online shopping, transportation, entertainment. From search engines to satellite images, from cell phones to credit cards, current technology can produce data faster than we can analyze them.

This course is the beginning of your journey into the field of Statistics, a discipline whose main goal is to extract information and meaning from data. Two main stages in constructing this meaning are (1) visual exploration of the data and (2) building models to explain variation in the data.

Because data are at the center of all of these endeavors, we will first take time to think about the collection of data and what factors can make data more or less reliable.