Chapter 2 Visualizing Data

The first step in any data analysis is to visually explore your data.

There is a saying that “a picture is worth a 1000 words.” In making visualizations, our goal is to quickly and easily get a better understanding of the variability, structure, and relationships that exist in the data.

Here we will cover the standard appropriate graphics for univariate variation and bivariate relationships. We will also cover techniques for multivariate relationships (3 or more variables). The choice of the graphic depends on the type(s) of variable(s): quantitative or categorical. Thus, the first step in creating a graphic is to think about the variables that you are interested in visualizing and determining whether they are quantitative or categorical.

For each type of variable, we use a real dataset to illustrate the visualizations.