1.1.4. What are the EDA Goals?

1. Exploratory Data Analysis
1.1. EDA Introduction

1.1.4. What are the EDA Goals?

Primary and Secondary Goals

The primary goal of EDA is to maximize the analyst's insight into a data set, into the underlying structure of a data set, and a secondary output of EDA is all of the specific items that an analyst would want to extract from a data set such as:

a good-fitting, parsimonious model
a list of outliers
a sense of robustness of conclusions
estimates for parameters
uncertainties for those estimates
a ranked list of important factors
conclusions as to whether individual factors are statistically significant
optimal settings

Insight into the Data

Insight implies detecting and uncovering underlying structure in the data. Such underlying structure may not be encapsulated in the list of items above; such items serve as the specific targets of an analysis, but the real insight and "feel" for a data set comes as the analyst judiciously probes and explores the various subtleties of the data. The "feel" for the data comes almost exclusively from the application of various graphical techniques--the collection of which serves as the window into the essence of the data. Graphics are irreplaceable--there are no quantitative analogues that will give the same insight as well-chosen graphics.

To get a "feel" for the data, it is not enough for the analyst to know what is in the data--the analyst must know what is not in the data, and the only way to do that is to draw on our own human pattern-recognition and comparative abilities in the context of a series of judicious graphical techniques applied to the data.