DESCRIBING AND EXPLORING DATA

I. Plotting Data.
Plotting data is the art of deciphering data in a visual setting, such as an outline or chart, to make
information less demanding for the human brain to process and extract experiences from. The
primary objective of data plotting is to simplify the distinction between designs, patterns, and
exceptions in expansive information sets.
Plotting data is one of the steps in data science preparation. It states that after the data has been
collected, prepared, and modeled, it must be plotted for conclusions to be made. Plotting data is
also a component of the broader data representation, which points to identifying, locating, and
manipulating information in the most effective way possible.

 Importance of Plotting Data.

Data visualization is useful in data cleaning, exploring data structure, detecting outliers and
unusual groups, identifying trends and clusters, spotting local patterns, evaluate modeling output,
and presenting results.

One way of organizing scattered data in some sort of logical order is the Frequency
Distribution.
 What is Frequency Distribution Table?
A frequency distribution table is a way to organize data so that it makes the data more
meaningful. A frequency distribution table is a chart that summarizes all the data under two
columns - variables/categories, and their frequency. It has two or three columns. Usually, the
first column lists all the outcomes as individual values or in the form of class intervals,
depending upon the size of the data set. The second column includes the tally marks of each
outcome. The third column lists the frequency of each outcome.
Do you know the meaning of "frequency?" Frequency indicates how often something occurs. For
example, your heartbeat is 72 heartbeats/min under normal conditions. Frequency corresponds to
the number of times a value occurs.
In our day-to-day lives, we come across a lot of information in the form of numerical figures,
tables, graphs, etc. This information could be marks scored by students, temperatures of different
cities, points scored in matches, etc. The information that is collected is called data. Once the
data is collected, we have to represent it in a meaningful manner so that it can be easily
understood. The frequency distribution table is one of the ways to organize data.
Here's a frequency distribution table example for you to understand this concept better.
Jane is fond of playing games with dice. She throws the dice and notes the observations each
time. These are her observations: 4, 6, 1, 2, 2, 5, 6, 6, 5, 4, 2, 3. To know the exact number of
times she got each digit (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) as the outcome, she classifies them into categories. An
easy way is to draw a frequency distribution table with tally marks.

Table 1.1 Number of times she got each digit of the dice.
Outcomes Tally Frequency
1 I 1
2 III 3
3 I 1
4 II 2
5 II 2
6 III 3

The table above is an example of a frequency table. You can observe that all the data that was
collected has been organized under three columns. Thus, the frequency distribution table is a
chart summarizing the values and their frequencies. In other words, it is a tool to organize data.
This makes it easy for us to understand the given set of information.
Thus, the frequency table in statistics helps us to condense data in a much simpler form so that it
is easy for us to observe at the first glance.
Now there are two types of frequency distribution: Grouped and Ungrouped Frequency
Distribution Tables.
Suppose we are to conduct a survey in which we ask 15 households how many pets they have in
their home. The results are as follows:
1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8
One way to summarize this result is to create a frequency distribution, right?
In this example, we will use the grouped frequency distributions, in which we create groups of
values and then summarize how many observations from a dataset fall into those groups.
Here’s an example of a grouped frequency distribution:
Table 1.2 Number of pets in homes.
NUMBER OF PETS FREQUENCY
1-2 7
3-4 3
5-6 3
6-7 2
We first created groups size of 2, then we counted how many individual observations from the
dataset fell in each group. For example:
 7 families had either 1 or 2 pets.
 3 families had either 3 or 4 pets.
 3 families had either 5 or 6 pets.
 2 families had either 6 or 7 pets.
Another type of frequency distribution to create is an ungrouped frequency distribution, which
displays the frequency of each individual data value rather than groups of data values.
Table 1.1 is an example an ungrouped frequency distribution table but for the sake of this comparison, we will make
another example.

Table 1.3 Number of pets in homes.

NUMBER OF PETS FREQUENCY
1 4
2 3
3 2
4 1
5 2
6 1
7 1
8 1

This type of frequency distribution allows us to directly see how often different values occurred
in our dataset. For example:

 4 families had 1 pet

 3 families had 2 pets
 2 families had 3 pets
 1 family had 4 pets

And so on.

 How to construct a frequency distribution table?

It is an easy task to construct a frequency distribution table by using the steps below:
STEP 1: Make a table with 3 columns – one with the title of the data you are organizing, another
one for the tally marks, and the last one is the frequency.
STEP 2: Look at the items written in the data and decide whether you want to draw an
ungrouped frequency distribution table or a grouped distribution table. If there are too many
different values, then it is usually better to go with the grouped frequency distribution table.
STEP 3: Write the data set values in the first column.
STEP 4: Count how many times each item is repeating itself in a collected data.
STEP 5: Write the frequency in the third column corresponding to each item.
STEP 6: At last you can also write the total frequency in the last row of the table.