2 Grokking the Problem: What does the data look like?
“Statistics may be defined as a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty”
W.A. Wallis, American economist and statistician
In this chapter and the next, we continue with the traveling diabetes clinic problem. We'll be taking a deeper look inside the data we used to start to understand its characteristics and see how it looks like – that is, describe it. By describing the data, we'll be able to make more convenient models that fit the data better than blindly choosing a model, like we did in Chapter 1.
To start to understand the data and describe it, we first need to understand what the data represents and how it relates to the real-world phenomenon that we're trying to study. That's what we're going to see in the next section.