Data Preparation

All applied statistics starts with a dataset and a problem to solve. In the real world, we never do statistical analysis in a vacuum; there is always a business problem to solve, a topic that needs to be quantitatively understood, or a scientific question to ask. Understanding the problem is always the very first step of any statistical analysis. The second step is to collect and prepare the data. Data collection is not a topic of this book, so we will go directly into data preparation. Therefore, before diving into doing some statistical calculations, we need to make sure we understand our business problem and that we have prepared our dataset.

Introducing the Dataset

In this subsection, we will introduce the dataset we will use in this chapter and perform some basic data preparation tasks. Knowing the dataset will give you a bit more context when we define the business problem.

We are going to use the strategy games dataset, which contains real-world information...