Data Scientist's Toolbox

Video Lectures

Week 3

Types of Questions

Types of analysis

• descriptive: describe the data, like census
• exploratory: find relationships (not causation)
• inferential: use a small sample to say something about a bigger population
• predictive: use data on some object to predict values for another object (still not causation)
• causal: find out what happens t one variable when you change another variable (very difficult)
• mechanistic: understand the exact changes in variables that lead to changes in other variables (very difficult, next to impossible unless system is nearly deterministic)