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Descriptive statistics give us a general understanding of what our data are like. This is a good starting point.
We typically want to go beyond simple descriptive summaries of the data. We might want to know how one variable relates to another. A classic example is the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Sometimes relationships between variables are called links or associations. One variable tends to occur or not occur with along another variable.
The next series of commands is devoted to exploring relationships with scatterplots, correlation coefficients, and linear regression. These analyses are often used in nonexperimental research situations where we might have more than one measured variable available for each person. The goal is to see how variables such as smoking and lung cancer might be associated.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows sharing, adapting, and remixing.