Introduction to Data Visualization and Characterization

Abstract

This chapter focuses on basic graphical and numerical methods for data description and exploration. Data visualization is used to represent the data using graphical methods. It is one of the most effective and intuitive ways to explore the important patterns in the data such as data distribution, relationship among variables, surprising clusters, and outliers. The chapter discusses some of the most basic and useful types of graphical methods or data plots for industrial data analytics applications. It introduces commonly used plots that show some aspects of how multiple variables are related to each other. The pairwise relationship of multiple numerical variables can be visualized simultaneously by using a matrix of scatter plots. Data visualization is an effective and intuitive representation of the qualitative features of the data. The chapter also introduces common summary statistics for univariate and multivariate data.