You start off with a need to do statistics, which may
seem like a weird statement but then again you’re reading this
book.... Perhaps your need arises from:
-
A specific problem or
opportunity, say a business problem, like the need to test a potential
pharmaceutical drug or to exploit a new opportunity. The Accu-Phi
company, introduced in Chapter 1, has various business problems such
as identifying and understanding their services sales numbers.
-
You may have a more
general need to understand your particular world better (perhaps you
are an insurance company that wants to analyze its claims data for
any patterns it can find).
-
Perhaps you have a research
report for a university degree or other need.
Often, your requirements
help you understand the type of data you require, the statistics you
need, and the like. All too often, businesspeople or readers sabotage
their own research because they do not adequately understand what
they wanted to achieve in the first place, causing them to gather
the wrong data or do the wrong analyses. Therefore, try to have a
really good idea of your needs prior to going any further. Identifying
the right problem is a major up-front challenge.
Note that I am not saying
your intended outcomes from a statistics project must be exactly defined.
It is fine to say that you just want to explore your company’s
data for useful patterns, or the like. However, knowing what you do
and do not want to achieve will invariably help guide your efforts.
In addition, always
think deeply about the context of the data situation. By context,
I mean the environment of the situation (such as the culture of the
people involved), the physical environment, and the like. Consider
how the context affects the data involved, and whether this context
gives you extra information about what or who to study.
For instance, say you
are studying financial investment portfolios. Your study and expectations
should be heavily affected by the broader financial or economic environment
at the time. If there is a major financial and economic crash in the
middle of the time period of your study, your entire thinking about
the problem and possibly your data choices may change. In the case
of Accu-Phi, you have already made some choices about what might affect
sales – are there other aspects of the sales process and environment
issues you have omitted?