CSTAT Seminar: Initial data analysis

Presenter: Marianne Huebner

The main aim of Initial Data Analysis (IDA) is seen in providing reliable knowledge about the data to enable responsible statisticalanalyses and interpretation. IDA consists of all steps performed on the data of a study between the end of the data collection/entry and start of those statistical analyses that address research questions.  If IDA is performed in an informal or unstructured way, this may have a large and non-transparent impact on results and conclusions presented in publications and contributes to (non-)reproducibility issues.  In this talk I will discuss a framework that suggests to divide IDA into six steps. While the focus is on primary-data collections, where data are obtained to address a predefined set of research questions, with an analysis plan, IDA is often performed in more complex studies raising additional issues such as an implementation of IDA processes during ongoing data collections to detect data issues while they are potentially remediable.