Chapter 1. Prelude: Understanding data with gnuplot
Gnuplot is probably the most widely used open source program for plotting and visualizing data. In this book, I want to show you how to use gnuplot to make plots and graphs of your data: both quick and easy graphs for your own use and highly polished graphs for presentations and publications.
But I also want to show you something else: how to solve data analysis problems using graphical methods. The art of discovering relationships in data and extracting information from it by visual means is called graphical analysis and I believe gnuplot to be an excellent tool for it.
As a teaser, let’s take a look at some problems and how we might be able to approach them using graphical methods. The graphs here and in the rest of the book (with very few exceptions) have been, of course, generated with gnuplot.
To get a feeling for the kinds of problems that we may be dealing with, and for the kinds of solutions that gnuplot can help us find, let’s look at two examples. Both take place during a long and busy weekend.