Introduction to Data Analysis and R Programming

Bard College | Thinking with Data

A full data analysis workflow

  1. Ask interesting questions

  2. Get the data

  3. Explore the data

  4. Model the data

  5. Communicate and visualize the results

What is our role as data analysts?

  • To tell the stories that data supports, but be sure that we bring out all the stories, all the relevant pieces, make all the connections.

  • The most important aspect of working with data is the communication we do about it – which requires accuracy and clarity.

  • As we’ll see, what we eventually want to do is write with data, to construct a story that data helps flesh out.

  • The data alone are useless, we have to think about it, probe in different ways to see what it can tell us.

The Software

Data science life cycle

# A tibble: 5 × 2
  date             season
  <chr>            <chr> 
1 23 January 2017  winter
2 4 March 2017     spring
3 14 June 2017     summer
4 1 September 2017 fall  
5 ...              ...

Let’s dive in!

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