Statistics for Business: Decision Making and Analysis, 3rd Edition

3.1 Looking at Data

Let’s get specific about our motivation. You need a clear goal when you look at data, particularly a large data table. Our task in this chapter is to answer the following question:

1. Which hosts send the most visitors to Amazon’s Web site?

The data we have track a small percentage of activity at Amazon, but that still amounts to 188,996 visits from households in the United States. Table 3.1 lists six visits that we chose at random to illustrate the contents of each column. You would not want to read through the rest of these data, much less tabulate by hand the number of visits from various hosts.

That’s the problem with huge data tables: You cannot see what’s going on, and seeing is what we want to do. How else can we find ...