Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is a crucial step in the data analysis process that involves
investigating datasets to summarize their main characteristics, often with visual methods. It helps to
understand the structure, patterns, trends, and anomalies in the data. Here are the main topics that
come under EDA:
### 1. **Data Cleaning**
- **Handling Missing Data**: Techniques like imputation (mean, median, mode), dropping missing
values, or filling with a constant.
- **Outlier Detection and Removal**: Identifying and handling extreme values that might distort
analysis.
- **Data Transformation**: Correcting errors in data, such as fixing inconsistent formats, converting
categorical variables, or scaling numerical features.
### 2. **Data Visualization**
- **Univariate Visualization**: Exploring individual features with plots like:
- Histograms
- Box plots
- Bar plots
- Density plots
- **Bivariate and Multivariate Visualization**: Exploring relationships between two or more
variables with:
- Scatter plots
- Pair plots (scatterplot matrix)
- Heatmaps (for correlation analysis)
- Violin plots or KDE (Kernel Density Estimation)
- **Time Series Visualization**: Plotting data points over time for trends and seasonality.
- **Categorical Data Visualization**: Bar plots, pie charts, and count plots for categorical variables.
### 3. **Summary Statistics**
- **Descriptive Statistics**: Measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and spread
(standard deviation, variance, range, interquartile range).
- **Skewness and Kurtosis**: Assessing the distribution shape of the data.
- **Correlation Analysis**: Investigating relationships between features, often with Pearson or
Spearman correlation coefficients and visualized using heatmaps.
### 4. **Data Distribution Analysis**
- **Distribution of Features**: Checking how the features are distributed (normal, skewed,
uniform, etc.).
- **Normality Tests**: Using tests like Shapiro-Wilk or Anderson-Darling to assess whether data
follows a normal distribution.
- **Transformations**: Applying transformations (e.g., log or square root) to normalize skewed
data.
### 5. **Feature Engineering**
- **Feature Creation**: Deriving new features from existing data, like creating categorical bins or
combining columns.
- **Dimensionality Reduction**: Techniques like PCA (Principal Component Analysis) or t-SNE for
reducing the feature space while preserving variance.
- **Encoding Categorical Variables**: Using techniques like one-hot encoding, label encoding, or
target encoding to convert categorical data into numerical formats.
### 6. **Handling Categorical Data**
- **Frequency Distribution**: Analyzing how often each category appears.
- **Cross-tabulation**: Understanding relationships between two categorical variables through
contingency tables.
- **Chi-Square Test**: Testing the independence of categorical variables.
### 7. **Exploring Relationships Between Variables**
- **Correlation**: Understanding how numerical variables are related (e.g., Pearson, Spearman).
- **Covariance**: Measuring the degree to which two variables change together.
- **Scatterplots**: Visualizing pairwise relationships between continuous variables.
- **Group-by and Aggregation**: Summarizing data by grouping based on categories and
calculating means, medians, sums, etc.
### 8. **Time Series Analysis (if applicable)**
- **Trend Analysis**: Identifying long-term movement in data.
- **Seasonality**: Detecting periodic fluctuations.
- **Stationarity**: Checking if the mean and variance of a series are constant over time.
- **Decomposition**: Breaking down time series into trend, seasonality, and residual components.
### 9. **Dimensionality Reduction (if applicable)**
- **Principal Component Analysis (PCA)**: Identifying the main components (directions of
maximum variance) in high-dimensional data.
- **t-SNE (t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding)**: Reducing dimensions for visualization
while preserving relationships.
- **Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA)**: Finding a lower-dimensional representation that
maximizes class separation (used in classification tasks).
### 10. **Clustering (optional in EDA)**
- **K-means Clustering**: Identifying groups in the data based on similarity.
- **Hierarchical Clustering**: Building a tree of clusters to explore potential groupings.
- **DBSCAN**: Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise.
### 11. **Advanced Visualizations (optional)**
- **Pair Plots**: Visualizing pairwise relationships in a dataset.
- **Heatmaps**: Visualizing correlations, missing data, or clustering results.
- **3D Visualizations**: For higher-dimensional data, using 3D scatter plots or surface plots.
- **Geospatial Visualization**: Mapping data that includes geographic coordinates.
### 12. **Modeling Assumptions and Validation**
- **Assumptions Check**: Ensuring assumptions of statistical tests or models (e.g., linearity,
independence) are met.
- **Cross-Validation**: Dividing data into training and validation sets to evaluate model
performance.
### 13. **Interaction with Domain Knowledge**
- **Data Context**: Understanding how data fits into the domain or business context and exploring
features in ways that are relevant to specific hypotheses.
### 14. **Documentation and Reporting**
- **Summary Reports**: Documenting findings and observations made during the EDA process.
- **Insights and Actionable Findings**: Providing business or research insights based on the
exploration.
EDA is largely an iterative, interactive process, and its main goal is to gain an in-depth understanding
of the dataset before applying more formal statistical or machine learning models.
