Overview

Teaching: 5 min Exercises: 10 min

Questions

• What tools would you use to solve some typical data queries?

Objectives

• Introduce questions that will guide our sample exercises

• Discover pros and cons of your existing toolsets for exploring data

• Gain some immediate experience working with a typical DSSG dataset

Research Questions

In our examples for subsequent lessons, we will be guided by the following five research questions:

Questions

1. How many “TRESPASS” offenses occurred in total?

2. What is the most common crime in the dataset?

3. Which month has the most crimes?

4. Which census track has the highest crime rate?

5. What is the most common crime within 5 km of my house?

Data Exploration (5 minutes)

• Read through the 5 research questions above.
• What method would you use, given what you know right now, to try to answer these questions?
• What software would you use?
• Within that software, what libraries or tools would you employ?

Key Points

• There are many different ways to explore the same dataset