Why EDA?

The main purpose of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is to help analysts examine the data before making any assumptions. By visually and statistically exploring the dataset, analysts can uncover patterns, trends, and distributions within the data. This understanding is crucial for making informed decisions about data preprocessing, feature engineering, and selecting appropriate modeling techniques.

EDA plays a vital role in identifying and detecting unusual events or outliers. Outliers are data points that deviate significantly from the majority of observations and can have a significant impact on the analysis and modeling results. By identifying and understanding outliers, analysts can decide how to handle them, such as removal, transformation, or other appropriate methods.

EDA helps analysts discover interesting relationships between variables by examining correlations, associations, and dependencies. These insights are crucial for feature selection, identifying important predictors, and understanding the data's dynamics.

Data scientists rely on exploratory analysis to ensure the validity and relevance of the results they produce, aligning them with desired business outcomes and goals. By thoroughly exploring the data, they can verify if the right questions are being asked and refine their research objectives accordingly. EDA acts as a validating mechanism, aiding stakeholders in framing appropriate inquiries and making well-informed decisions.

EDA helps answer specific questions about the data, such as standard deviations, categorical variables, and confidence intervals. It provides insights into the spread, variability, distribution, and frequency of the data, enabling analysts to make informed decisions.

After completing EDA, the insights and derived features can be used for more complex data analysis and modeling tasks, including machine learning. The identified patterns, relationships, and outliers guide feature selection, inform model assumptions, and enhance the accuracy and interpretability of predictive models.

In summary, EDA is a critical step in data analysis that helps analysts examine the data, uncover patterns and outliers, discover relationships, ensure validity, answer specific questions, and provide a foundation for advanced analysis and modeling. It empowers analysts to make informed decisions and derive meaningful insights from the data, facilitating successful data-driven decision-making processes.