ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to provide some introductory and background information. First, we cover the philosophy of exploratory data analysis and discuss how this fits in with other data analysis techniques and objectives. This is followed by an overview of the text, which includes the software that will be used and the background necessary to understand the methods. We then present several data sets that will be employed throughout the book to illustrate the concepts and ideas. Finally, we conclude the chapter with some information on data transforms, which will be important in some of the methods presented in the text.
