🖥️ Week 09 Lecture

Methodology Design and Exploratory Data Analysis

Author

Dr Jon Cardoso-Silva

Published

27 November 2025

📍 Logistics

Time and Location: Thursday, 27 November 2025, 16:00 - 18:00, CLM 5.02

📋 Preparation

Review your current ✍️ Mini-Project 2 methodology
Bring your MP2 notebooks for the workshop activities

📓 Lecture Materials

Interactive slides with collaborative activities. More examples will be added to the slides after Thursday’s lecture.

Hour 1 (16:00 to 17:00): Methodology Clinic

This first hour is a (hopefully very fun and useful) interactive workshop activity where you will pitch your methodology ideas to your peers and receive structured feedback on your approach.

To accomplish this, I will use a very popular framework from the business world (S.M.A.R.T.) to help you see if what you are doing in your ✍️ Mini-Project 2 project is actually a good idea.

Hour 2 (17:00 to 18:00): Important considerations in Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

I will bring a few examples of things to always look out for in your NB03 (and sometimes NB02) when it comes to exploring the data in search of insights.

I will talk about:

The checks to do on your data at the start of your analysis (are there any missing values? are there any weird values?)
What to do (if anything) with outliers? (and what are outliers?)
What do you mean by “average”? (when to use mean, median, or mode? how to talk about uncertainty in data?)
Repeat after me: “correlation does not imply causation” (see fun examples here)

🎬 Lecture Slides

Note that the slides will still go through change until the day of the lecture

Use keyboard arrows to navigate. Select the slides below or view fullscreen.

🔖 Appendix

Post‑Lecture Actions

Refine your MP2 methodology using the feedback you received
Continue working on ✍️ Mini-Project 2 (due W10)

Useful Links

Looking Ahead

Mini-Project 2: Due Week 10 Wednesday 8 pm
Week 10: Final MP2 support and advanced concepts
Week 11: Group project planning and collaboration workflows