What is Exploratory Analysis?

The goal of exploratory analysis is to examine or explore the data and find relationships that weren’t previously known. Exploratory analyses explore how different measures might be related to each other but do not confirm that relationship as causative. You’ve probably heard the phrase “Correlation does not imply causation” and exploratory analyses lie at the root of this saying. Just because you observe a relationship between two variables during exploratory analysis, it does not mean that one necessarily causes the other. Because of this, exploratory analyses, while useful for discovering new connections, should not be the final say in answering a question! It can allow you to formulate hypotheses and drive the design of future studies and data collection, but exploratory analysis alone should never be used as the final say on why or how data might be related to each other. Rather than just summarizing the data points within a single variable, we can look at how two or more variables might be related to each other. Exploring this data, we can see quite a few relationships. All exploratory analysis can tell us is that a relationship exists, not the cause.