The recent dramatic rise in the number of public datasets available free from the Internet, coupled with the evolution of the Open Source software movement, which makes powerful analysis packages like R freely available, have greatly increased both the range of opportunities for exploratory data analysis and the variety of tools that support this type of analysis.

This book will provide a thorough introduction to a useful subset of these analysis tools, illustrating what they are, what they do, and when and how they fail. Specific topics covered include descriptive characterizations like...