Exploring Exploratory Data Analysis

I'm assuming that you have little or no experience with statistics and data science, so terms like "statistical inference" are not meaningful to you. It's a lot easier to understand concepts when we have concrete examples of them, so our goal here is to work through a complete example of data exploration and analysis. This will ground all the concepts which we will then go through in more detail in later chapters.

We are going to analyse climate data. We are all familiar with weather. The core of climate data is measurements of the weather, so it's fairly easy to understand and relate to. Climate data is also easy to obtain. The data we are using is freely available, and you may wish to find data for your local area and perform a similar analysis on it. Finally, climate change is topical and analyzing climate data lets us take our own look at the issue.

Enough background, let's get on with it!