Steve Baty has written a gem for JohnnyHolland.org on Deconstructing Analysis Techniques. Essentially a primer on various types of data analysis and organization methods, this meta-analysis is succinct, clear and readable. Baty did a great job of defining and differentiating terms that all to often are used interchangeably or imprecisely. He is assisted by the simple, but effective graphics of Jeroen van Geel, which serve as a data visualization to accompany the text. For example, on "Aggregation":
In one respect aggregation is simply the process of bringing together data from a variety of sources and adding it together. In an analytic context it also carries with it the connotation of combining those sources together into something new...
...We combine data from each of these sources and arrive at some single figure - based on some form of calculation (we’ll save the ‘how’ of that for another time). That single figure - which we can track year-to-year - is our aggregate. Unlike a summary, which characterizes a single piece of data, you can see that our aggregate is a composite value.
In short, a beautiful little article...I wish I could write like this once in a while.
