Exploratory Data Analysis and
Data Visualization
Credits: ChrisVolinsky - Columbia University
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Outline
• EDA
• Visualization
– One variable
– Two variables
– More than two variables
– Other types of data
– Dimension reduction
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EDA and Visualization
• Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and Visualization are very
important steps in any analysis task.
• get to know your data!
– distributions (symmetric, normal, skewed)
– data quality problems
– outliers
– correlations and inter-relationships
– subsets of interest
– suggest functional relationships
• Sometimes EDA or viz might be the goal!
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Data Visualization – cake bakery
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Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
• Goal: get a general sense of the data
– means, medians, quantiles, histograms, boxplots
• You should always look at every variable - you will learn something!
• data-driven (model-free)
• Think interactive and visual
– Humans are the best pattern recognizers
– You can use more than 2 dimensions!
• x,y,z, space, color, time….
• Especially useful in early stages of data mining
– detect outliers (e.g. assess data quality)
– test assumptions (e.g. normal distributions or skewed?)
– identify useful raw data & transforms (e.g. log(x))
• Bottom line: it is always well worth looking at your data!
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Summary Statistics
• not visual
• sample statistics of data X
– mean: = i Xi / n
– mode: most common value in X
– median: X=sort(X), median = Xn/2 (half below, half above)
– quartiles of sorted X: Q1 value = X0.25n , Q3 value = X0.75 n
• interquartile range: value(Q3) - value(Q1)
• range: max(X) - min(X) = Xn - X1
– variance: 2 = i (Xi - )2 / n
– skewness: i (Xi - )3 / [ (i (Xi - )2)3/2 ]
• zero if symmetric; right-skewed more common (what kind of data is
right skewed?)
– number of distinct values for a variable (see unique() in R)
– Don’t need to report all of thses: Bottom line…do these numbers
make sense??? 6
Single Variable Visualization
• Histogram:
– Shows center, variability, skewness, modality,
– outliers, or strange patterns.
– Bin width and position matter
– Beware of real zeros
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Issues with Histograms
• For small data sets, histograms can be misleading.
– Small changes in the data, bins, or anchor can deceive
• For large data sets, histograms can be quite effective at
illustrating general properties of the distribution.
• Histograms effectively only work with 1 variable at a time
– But ‘small multiples’ can be effective
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But be careful
with axes and
scales!
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Smoothed Histograms - Density Estimates
• Kernel estimates smooth out the contribution of each
datapoint over a local neighborhood of that point.
n
x xi
fˆ (x) 1
nh K( h )
i1
h is the kernel width
• Gaussian kernel is common:
2
1 x x (i )
2 h
Ce
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Bandwidth
choice is an art
Usually want to
try several
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Boxplots
• Shows a lot of information about
a variable in one plot
– Median
– IQR
– Outliers
– Range
– Skewness
• Negatives
– Overplotting
– Hard to tell distributional shape
– no standard implementation in
software (many options for
whiskers, outliers)
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Time Series
If your data has a temporal component, be sure to exploit it
summer bifurcations in air travel
(favor early/late)
summer
peaks
steady growth
trend
New Year bumps
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Time-Series Example 3
mean weight vs mean age
for 10k control group
Scotland experiment: Possible explanations:
“ milk in kid diet better health” ?
Grow less early in year than later?
20,000 kids: Would expect smooth weight growth plot.
5k raw, 5k pasteurize, No steps in height plots; so why
10k control (no supplement) Visually reveals
height uniformly, weight spurts?
unexpected pattern (steps),
not apparent from raw data table.
Kids weighed in clothes: summer garb
lighter than winter?
Spatial Data
• If your data has a
geographic
component, be sure to
exploit it
• Data from
cities/states/zip cods
– easy to get lat/long
• Can plot as scatterplot
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Spatial data: choropleth Maps
• Maps using color shadings to represent numerical values are called
chloropleth maps
• http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html 16
Two Continuous Variables
• For two numeric variables, the scatterplot is the
obvious choice
interesting?
interesting?
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2D Scatterplots
• standard tool to display relation • useful to answer:
between 2 variables – x,y related?
– e.g. y-axis = response, x-axis = • linear
suspected indicator • quadratic
• other
– variance(y) depend on x?
– outliers present?
interesting?
interesting?
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Scatter Plot: No apparent relationship
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Scatter Plot: Linear relationship
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Scatter Plot: Quadratic relationship
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Scatter plot: Homoscedastic
Why is this important in classical statistical modelling?
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Scatter plot: Heteroscedastic
variation in Y differs depending on the value of X
e.g., Y = annual tax paid, X = income
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Two variables - continuous
• Scatterplots
– But can be bad with lots of data
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Two variables - continuous
• What to do for large data sets
– Contour plots
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Transparent plotting
Alpha-blending:
• plot( rnorm(1000), rnorm(1000), col="#0000ff22", pch=16,cex=3)
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Jittering
• Jittering points helps too
• plot(age, TimesPregnant)
• plot(jitter(age),jitter(TimesPregnant)
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Displaying Two Variables
• If one variable is
categorical, use small
multiples
• Many software packages
have this implemented as
‘lattice’ or ‘trellis’
packages
library(‘lattice’)
histogram(~DiastolicBP | TimesPregnant==0)
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Two Variables - one categorical
• Side by side boxplots are very effective in showing differences in a
quantitative variable across factor levels
– tips data
• do men or women tip better
– orchard sprays
• measuring potency of various orchard sprays in repelling honeybees
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Barcharts and Spineplots
stacked barcharts can be
used to compare
continuous values across
two or more categorical
ones.
orange=M blue=F
spineplots show
proportions well, but can
be hard to interpret
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More than two
variables
Pairwise scatterplots
Can be somewhat
ineffective for
categorical data
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Multivariate: More than two variables
• Get creative!
• Conditioning on variables
– trellis or lattice plots
– Cleveland models on human perception, all based on
conditioning
– Infinite possibilities
• Earthquake data:
– locations of 1000 seismic events of MB > 4.0. The events
occurred in a cube near Fiji since 1964
– Data collected on the severity of the earthquake
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How many
dimensions are
represented here?
Andrew Gelman blog 7/15/2009 36
Multivariate Vis: Parallel Coordinates
Petal, a non-reproductive
part of the flower
Sepal, a non-reproductive
part of the flower
The famous iris data!
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Parallel Coordinates
Sepal
Length
5.1
sepal sepal petal petal
length width length width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
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Parallel Coordinates: 2 D
Sepal Sepal
Length Width
3.5
5.1
sepal sepal petal petal
length width length width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
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Parallel Coordinates: 4 D
Sepal Sepal Petal Petal
Length Width length Width
3.5
5.1 0.2
1.4
sepal sepal petal petal
length width length width
5.1 3.5 1.4 0.2
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Parallel Visualization of Iris data
3.5
5.1
1.4
0.2
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Multivariate: Parallel coordinates
Alpha blending
can be effective
Courtesy Unwin, Theus, Hofmann
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Parallel coordinates
• Useful in an interactive setting
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Networks and Graphs
• Visualizing networks is helpful, even if is not obvious that a
network exists
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Network Visualization
• Graphviz (open source software) is a nice layout tool for big and small
graphs
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What’s missing?
• pie charts
– very popular
– good for showing simple relations of proportions
– Human perception not good at comparing arcs
– barplots, histograms usually better (but less pretty)
• 3D
– nice to be able to show three dimensions
– hard to do well
– often done poorly
– 3d best shown through “spinning” in 2D
• uses various types of projecting into 2D
• http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~west/bradley/
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Worst graphic in the world?
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Dimension Reduction
• One way to visualize high dimensional data is to
reduce it to 2 or 3 dimensions
– Variable selection
• e.g. stepwise
– Principle Components
• find linear projection onto p-space with maximal variance
– Multi-dimensional scaling
• takes a matrix of (dis)similarities and embeds the points in p-
dimensional space to retain those similarities
More on this in next Topic
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Visualization done right
• Hans Rosling @ TED
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo
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