Tag: Exploratory Data Analysis

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Is your state really the best in college basketball?

As we roll up to another college basketball tournament, there is no shortage of rankings of teams and conferences to help avid fans fill out their brackets. A different kind of ranking that recently caught my eye was “Power Ranking the 50 US States by College Basketball Strength” by Kerry

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What-if analysis with JMP (no spreadsheets) -- Part 5

Last week, I showed how the Excel Add-In for JMP can bring more value to Excel spreadsheets for what-if analysis and optimization. Today, we’ll look at how using that same data from within JMP alone is more elegant. First, let’s look at the Excel spreadsheet from last week's post (see

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Scenario-based planning & optimization in Excel & JMP -- Part 4

Over the past few weeks, we’ve looked at the rise of Excel’s usage and popularity, and I've noted that Excel has made forays into analytics. Today, we’ll look at one type of analysis: scenario-based planning and optimization. Using Excel add-ins, you can create what-if analysis and scenario-based planning using Monte

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Strengths and weaknesses of spreadsheets -- Part 2

Last week, I shared some of the many stories about errors in Excel spreadsheets that led to misinformation and to a  path toward incorrect decisions. Today, we’ll explore why such errors can be potentially pervasive. The power of the spreadsheet has always been its interactive ease of use. It allows

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Why spreadsheets can lead to error -- Part 1

In 2010, esteemed Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published the paper “Growth in a Time of Debt.” It soon became powerful supporting evidence for those who argued against growing government spending, even in times of needed economic stimulation. The paper looked at the debt levels of many different

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The dead walk! Visualizing a zombie apocalypse

Halloween is here. It’s a time when the weather gets colder and the leaves fall from the trees. A time when kids dress up in fun costumes and go trick-or-treating. A time when we start thinking about how to spend the holidays with our family and friends. And if you’re like me,

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Celebrating Statisticians: John W. Tukey

“Statistics is a science in my opinion, and it is no more a branch of mathematics than are physics, chemistry and economics;  for if its methods fail the test of experience – not the test of logic – they are discarded.”  - John Wilder Tukey “Box plot,” “stem and leaf plot,”

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Statistics: The language of science

A recent KD Nuggets poll caught my attention. It asked respondents to complete a sentence as follows: “With the trend towards Big Data and Data-driven Machine Learning methods Statistics will become less important Statistics importance will not change Statistics will become more important, as the foundation of Data Science Not

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The well-appointed analytic workbench

What do I mean by “analytic workbench?” Basically, the compute-resource environment with which data analysis takes place. How would you describe some of the analytic workbenches in your organization? Not everyone is a power analyst, so not everyone requires power tools. But all of us deal with data at some

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JMP data modeling challenge launched by ENBIS

ENBIS, the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics, has launched the next JMP Challenge sponsored by JMP. You have until June 15 to submit your solution showing how to turn data into practical value. The ENBIS Challenge by JMP is a yearly activity aimed at promoting sound practices of