ECON 2500 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Exploratory Data Analysis, Categorical Variable, Normal Distribution

• School: York University
• Department: Economics
• Course: ECON 2500
• Professor: Augustine Wong

Document Summary

Topic: looking at data - distributions: reading: chapter 1. Introduction: data, displaying distributions with graphs, describing distributions with numbers, density curves and normal distributions. Data: cases, labels, variables, and values, categorical and quantitative variables, key characteristics of a data set. What is statistics: statistics is the science of learning from data, an exploratory data analysis is the process of using statistical tools and ideas to examine data. The first step in dealing with data is to organize your thinking about the data. in order to describe their main features. Cases, labels, variables, and values: cases are the objects described by a set of data. Categorical and quantitative variables: a categorical variable places each case into one of several groups, or categories, a quantitative variable takes numerical values for which arithmetic operations such as adding and averaging make sense. The distribution of a variable tells us the values that a variable takes and how often it takes each value.