Online Tools for Analyzing Data

Quick and easy ways to create a data dashboard

Exploration of online tools that are cheap (translation:free) and easy to use

How to create a dashboard of statistics that speak to stakeholders in your community

Goals of this session

Is it an interesting question? Who is asking the question?

Do you have the right data to answer these questions?

If you don’t have the data, do you know where to get it?

Do you have the right tools to do the analyses?

Who is your audience? When do you need to be done?

Planning the analysis

Questions to ask:◦ Does the data have the right information (fields)?◦ Do you know what each of the values in the

relevant fields stand for?◦ Is the time frame relevant to answering the

question?◦ Is it relevant to the geographical area for which you

doing the analysis?◦ How reliable is the data?◦ Is it one data set or more than one?◦ If multiple data sets, can you relate them?◦ What are the privacy, legal and security concerns?

Finding your data sources

For each data element ask the following questions:◦ Who collects this data?◦ Why is this data being collected?◦ Is there a reason for systematic bias in this data?◦ Does this field contain a lot of missing data?◦ Does this field contain a large number of outlier

values?◦ Does the data make sense?

Evaluating your data sources

Census (www.census.gov) NCES (nces.ed.gov) NAAL (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/) Other government open data projects

◦ Data.gov (http://www.data.gov/)◦ NYC open data portal (

https://nycopendata.socrata.com/)◦ NYS open data portal (https://data.ny.gov/)◦ Data from other government entities (example:

School districts)

Commonly used public data sources

What is your MIS system capable of?◦ Existing reports (with and without

dissaggregation)◦ Downloads of existing reports◦ Data downloads◦ Reviewing data screens

Looking within your own data

http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml

Census data

Watch out for ◦ Outliers and invalid values◦ Number of records that make sense

Simple methods for cleaning your data◦ Sorting in spreadsheets◦ Frequency counts

Validate against other sources

How to clean your data

Google Trends◦ http://www.google.com/trends/

Google correlate◦ http://www.google.com/trends/correlate

Google Fusion Google Ngram Viewer

◦ https://books.google.com/ngrams Tableau Public

◦ http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/ Microsoft Excel

Analyzing your data

Educational Attainment for Kings County

Designing a dashboard

Venu Thelakkat◦ venut@lacnyc.org◦ Adultedgps.blogspot.com

Questions