EXPLORING DATA

What is Data
Analysis?
 The first step in
understanding data is to
hear what the data say.

What does it say?

 Numbers speak clearly
only when we help them
speak by organizing,
displaying, and
summarizing
How about this one?
 GLOSSARY

STATISTICS

The science of data

 GLOSSARY

INDIVIDUALS
Are the objects described
by a set of data
 GLOSSARY

VARIABLE

Any characteristic of an
individual
How much snow?

The TV weather report says

Boston got 24 inches of white
stuff. To report the value of a
variable, we must first
measure it.
 What questions you
should ask yourselves
before exploring data
from your
experiment?
WHO?
WHAT?
WHY?
 GLOSSARY

Categorical
variable
Places an individual into
one of several groups or
categories
 GLOSSARY

Quantitative
variable
Takes numerical values
for which arithmetic
operations such as
adding and averaging
makes sense
 TASK #1

• The radio audience rating service

Arbitron places the country’s
13,838 radio stations into
categories that describe the kind
of programs they broadcast.
Next table shows the distribution
of station formats.
FORMAT COUNT OF STATONS PERCENT OF
STATIONS
Adult contemporary 1,556 11.2
Adult standards 1,196 8.6
Contemporary hit 569 4.1
Country 2,066 14.9
News/ Talk/ 2,179 15.7
Information 1,060 7.7
Oldies 2,014 14.6
Religious 869 6.3
Rock 750 5.4
Spanish language 1,579 11.4
Other formats

Total 13,838 99.9

Do the data tell you what you want to
know?
Let’s say that you plan to buy radio
time to advertise your Web site for
downloading MP3 music files. How
helpful are the data in the given
example?
 ASSIGNMENT
Never on Sunday?

Births are not, as you might think, evenly distributed across

the days of the week. Here are the average numbers of babies
born on each day of the week in 2003.
Sunday- 7563 births
Monday- 11,733
Tuesday- 13,001
Wednesday- 12,598
Thursday- 12, 514
Friday- 12, 396
Saturday- 8,605
1. Present the data in a well-labeled bar graph.
2. Would it also be correct to make a pie chart?
3. Suggest some possible reasons why there are
fewer births on weekends.
QUANTITATIVE
VARIABLES:
HISTOGRAMS
 Quantitative variables often take many values.
The distribution tells us what values the variable
takes and hw often it takes these values.

The most common graph of the distribution of

one quantitative variable is histogram.
 The Score in a Periodical Test
Student Name SCore Student Name SCore
Amanda 45 Phi 38
Ana 34 Dado 45
Beb 30 Coco 45
Colin 44 Jed 48
Sam 34 Sev 45
Karen 30 Jun 45
Jade 29 Jep 34
Mark 33 Pipa 56
Ludo 43 Rave 34
Ken 43 John 34
Alma 31 Carl 38
Dude 35 Besty 40
 Making a Histogram
• 1. Choose the classes. Divide the range of the data
into classes of equal width.
• 2. Count the individuals in each class.
• 3. Draw the histogram. Mark the scale for the
variable whose distribution you are displaying on
the horizontal axis. The vertical axis contains the
scale of counts.
• The base of the bar covers the class, and the height
is the class count. There is no horizontal space
between the bars unless a class is empty, so that its
bar has height zero.
 Interpreting Histograms

In any graph of data, look

for the overall pattern
and for striking
deviations from that
pattern.
 SHAPE
CENTER
SPREAD

OUTLIER
 MIDPOINT

the value with roughly half

the observations taking
smaller values and half
taking larger values
 SYMMETRIC and SKEWED
DISTRIBUTIONS
• A distribution is symmetric if the right and left sides
of the histogram are approximately mirror images
of each other.

• A distribution is skewed to the right if the right side

of the histogram extends much farther out than
the left side.

• It is skewed to the left if the left side of the

hostogram extends much farther out than the right
side.
 TIMEPLOTS
Many variables are measured at intervals over
time. To display change over time, make a time
plot.
 GLOSSARY

Time plot
A time plot of a variable
plots each observation
agaisnt time at which it
was measured.
 Interpreting time plots
• Cycles- regular up-and-down movement

• Trend- a long term upward or downward

movement over time