Visualizing your data is a very

effective way to explore your data. We'll look at different ways to

visualize your data in this lecture. After this video, you will be able to discuss
how plots
can be useful in exploring data, describe how you would use a scatter plot,
and summarize what a boxplot shows. Visualizing data,
that is looking at data graphically, is a great way to explore your data set. Data
visualization is a nice complement
to using summary statistics for exploring data. We will cover several ways to
visualize your data in this lecture. There are several types of plots that
you can use to visualize your data. We will go over histogram, line plot,
scatter plot, bar plot, and box plot. These are the most commonly used plots,
but there are many others as well. A histogram is used to display
the distribution of a variable. The range of values for the variable
is divided into the number of bins, and the number of values that fall
into each bin is counted. Which determines the height of each bin. A histogram can
reveal many things
about a variable in your data, for example, you can usually determine
the central tendency of a variable, that is where the majority
of the values lie. You can also see the most frequent
value of values for that variable. A histogram also shows whether the values
for that variable are skewed and whether the skewness is to
the left towards smaller values or to the right towards larger values. You can also
pick outliers in
the histogram as shown on the bottom plot. A line plot shows how data
values change over time. The values of a variable or
variables are shown on the Y axis and the X axis shows the motion of time. The
resulting line displays
the data values over time. A line plot can show
patterns in your variables. For example, a cyclical pattern
can be detected as in this plot, where the values start high,
then decrease and go back up again. Trends can also be detected as
shown in the upper-right plot where the values fluctuate but
show a general upward trend over time. It is also easy to compare how multiple
variables change over time on a single line plot as displayed in
the center bottom plot. A scatter plot is a great way to visualize
the relationship between two variables. One variable is on the x axis. The other
variable is on
the y axis Each sample is a product using the values of the 2
variables aspects and Y coordinates. The resulting plot shows how one variable
changes as the other is changed. A scatter plot can be used to display
the correlation between 2 variables. For example, 2 variables such as
the high temperature of the day, and the low temperature of the day, can have a
positive correlation
as shown in this plot. A positive correlation means that as
the value of one variable increases, the value of the other variable
also increases by a similar amount. The upper right scatter plot shows
a negative correlation between two variables. This means that as the value
of one variable increases, there is a corresponding decrease in
the other variable, two variables can also have a non-linear correlation
as shown in the lower left plot. This means that a change
in one variable will not always correspond to the same
change in the other variable. This is indicated by the curve in
the scatter plot as opposed to something closer to a straight line for
linear correlation. There can also be no correlation
between two variables. In this case, you will see something
like randomly placed dots as displayed in the lower right plot,
indicating no relationship between how the two variables
change with respect to each other. A bar plot is used to show
the distribution of categorical variables. Recall that a histogram is also used to
look at the distribution of the values of the variable. The difference is that in
general,
a histogram is used for numeric variables whereas a bar plot
is used for categorical variables. In a bar chart, the different categories
of a categorical variable is shown along the x-axis, and the count of instances for
each category is displayed on the y-axis. This is an effective way to
compare the different categories. For example, the most frequent
category can be easily determined. A bar plot is also a great way to
compare two categorical variables. For example, this plot compares
two categorical variables. One in blue and the other in orange,
each with three different categories. Here you can see that for
the first category, the blue variable has the higher count, while the orange
variable has a higher
count for the second and third category. This type of Bar Plot is
called a Grouped Bar Chart. And the different variables
of products side by side. A different kind of comparison can be
performed using a Stacked Bar chart as seen in a lower right quad. Here, the
accounts for the two variables
are stacked on top of each other for each category. With this bar chart, you can
determine that the combined count for the first category is about equal to
the combine count for the second category, while the compliant count for
the third category is much larger. A box plot is another plot that shows
the distribution of a numeric variable, it shows the distribution in a different
format than the histogram, however. This is how a box plot displays
the distribution of values for a variable, the gray portion
in the figure is the box part. The lower and upper boundaries of
the box represent the 25th and 75th percentiles respectively. This means that the
box represents
the middle 50% of the data, the median is the 50th percentile,
meaning that 50% of the data is greater than its value and
50% of the data is less than this value. The top and bottom lines are the Whiskers
and represent the 10th and 90th percentiles respectively. So, 80% of the data are
in the region
indicated by the upper extreme and lower extreme. Any data values outside of
this region are outliers and are indicated as single
point on the box plot. Note that there are different
variations of the box plot, with the whiskers representing
different types of extreme values. Box plots provide a compact way to
show how variables are distributed, so they are often used to compare variables.
The box plot on the left for example compares the base salary for
two different roles. This plot can quickly provide information
regarding the median value, the range and the spread of the two different
variables. We can quickly see that
the median salary for the marketing role is higher
than the research role. We can also see that the variation or
spread of the values for marketing is greater than for research,
due to the larger area of the purple box. A box plot can also show you if
the distribution of the data values is symmetrical, positively skewed or
negatively skewed. Here we see that a box plot can
also be displayed on its side. A symmetric distribution is
indicated if the line in the box which specifies the median,
is in the center of the box. A negative skew is indicated
when the median is to the right of the center of the box. This means that there are
more
values that are less than the median than there are values
greater than the median. Similarly, a positive skew is indicated
when the median is to the left of the center of the box. To summarize,
data visualization provides a quick and intuitive way to examine your data. Data
visualization should be
used in conjunction with summary statistics that we discussed in
the last lecture to explore data. The different types of plots that we have
covered in this lecture will also be very helpful in communicating your results
throughout your machine learning project.