AbeBooks.com: A Handbook of Small Data Sets (Chapman & Hall Statistics Texts) (206) by David J. Hand; Fergus Daly; K. How To Install Itunes Without Internet on this page. Ostrowski and a great selection of similar New, Used and Collectible Books available now at great prices. 'A scan of the titles in the data structure index or the keywords in the subject index is a visit to an exotic bazaar, laden with fascinating trinkets from the storehouse of human curiosity and ingenuity. I cannot wait to use the book in my teaching.' -Short Book Reviews 'Statistics teachers often want a set of illustrative data and.
In many ways, working with data is like interviewing a live source. You ask questions of the data and get it to reveal the answers. But just as a source can only give answers about which he or she has information, a data set can only answer questions for which it has the right records and the proper variables. This means that you should consider carefully what questions you need to answer even before you acquire your data. Basically, you work backwards.
First, list the data-evidenced statements you want to make in your story. Then decide which variables and records you would have to acquire and analyze in order to make those statements. But be aware that there are a number of potentially interesting questions that this four-variable data set CAN’T answer, like the race and gender of victims, or the total value of stolen property, or which officers are most productive in making arrests. Also, you may only be able to get records for a certain time period, like the past three years, which would mean you couldn’t say anything about whether crime patterns have changed over a longer period of time.
Those questions may be outside of the planned purview of your story, and that’s fine. But you don’t want to get into your data analysis and suddenly decide you need to know what percentage of crimes in different parts of town are solved by arrest. One lesson here is that it’s often a good idea to request ALL the variables and records in the database, rather than the subset that could answer the questions for the immediate story. (In fact, getting all the data can be cheaper than getting a subset, if you have to pay the agency for the programming necessary to write out the subset.) You can always subset the data on your own, and having access to the full data set will let you answer new questions that may come up in your reporting and even produce new ideas for follow-up stories. It may be that confidentiality laws or other policies mean that some variables, such as the identities of victims or the names of confidential informants, can’t be released.
But even a partial database is much better than none, as long as you understand which questions the redacted database can and can’t answer. But such errors can skew a data journalist’s attempts to discover the patterns in the database. For that reason, the first big piece of work to undertake when you acquire a new data set is to examine how messy it is and then clean it up. Google Sketchup Pro 8 Crack Mackeeper. A good quick way to look for messiness is to create frequency tables of the categorical variables, the ones that would be expected to have a relatively small number of different values. (When using Excel, for instance, you can do this by using Filter or Pivot Tables on each categorical variable.). Take “Gender”, an easy example.