What's the Question?: Deciding What You Really Want to Know (Chapman & Hall/CRC Data Science Series)

Statistics and data science aim to extract understanding from data and guide decision-making.However, before applying any analytical tools, we need absolute clarity about what we want to know or accomplish.Ambiguous objectives inevitably lead to mistaken conclusions and flawed actions.This book investigates the deeper challenges of formulating clear questions and matching analytical methods to those questions - issues that apply as much to elementary statistical tools as to sophisticated techniques.Rather than focusing on standard statistical misuses or data provenance issues, this work examines the critical step of ensuring your analysis actually answers the question you mean to ask. Drawing from collaborative work across finance, medicine, government, manufacturing, defence, and other fields, the book deliberately emphasises basic and familiar tools so the fundamental issues are accessible to everyone.Following John Tukey's insight about the simplest problems of data analysis, the mo