Engineering Memo: Analyzing Research Data Insights
At this time, you have organized and formatted your data. Now, it’s time to begin investigating your research questions using your data. Think back to your research questions and ask yourself—in what way will the data tell me the answer to my question?
In an Engineering Memo, answer the following in 1-3 sentences each:
- What kind of trends, clusters, and/or correlations will I look for in my data?
- Which visualization techniques might be useful for analyzing my data?
- What sort of statistical analysis might be useful for analyzing my data? (Note, you are required to perform a PCA as part of your analysis).
- Am I interested in outlier data? If not do I think I can remove it from my dataset without sacrificing the statistical integrity of my data? (This is called “data cleaning”).
- Which variables do I anticipate will be the most important? The least?
When answering, please make direct reference to your research questions (i.e., how will answering 1-4 address your research questions specifically).
At this time, you should have completed your data collection for the project. Organize your data into a professionally formatted spreadsheet or spreadsheets, and then provide a final verbal “snapshot” of your data in an Engineering Memo:
- What kind of data is it? (spatial, temporal, multivariate, verbal, etc.) (1-3 sentences)
- How much data do you have? (how many variables, how many columns, rows) (1-3 sentences)
- Why is this amount of data necessary? (3-5 sentences)
- Describe the physical meanings of each of the data types by row and column (for example, “column one contains reactor temperature measurements as a function of time …the first ten rows of data contain individual experimental results….”) (use as many sentences as you need)
- Append the full dataset to your memo as a spreadsheet. APA