making sense of data

I have combined a summary of Chapter 17, 18 into one blog post since they all talk about how to handle seasonal data. Chapter 17 talks about how to smoothing out seasonal data. Chapter 18 talks about how to adjust the data to allow for seasonality. Chapter 16 talks about Average and Range Charts which …

In the following 3 chapters, the author will talk about count data. It may sound easy to count. But, there are some subtleties to keep in mind when interpreting count data. The author introduces a concept called Areas of Opportunity. Before we can define what is Areas of Opportunity and also give my own understand …

In this chapter, the author talks about how to detect the signal of assignable cause from a process behaviour chart. He first presents the characteristics of a predictable process, and then gives three major detection rules for an unpredictable process. However, my concern is how can we communicate them to the audience since it is …

In Chapter 7: Visualize Your Process Behavior, the author introduces a tool called the XmR chart. XmR chart is used to detect assignable causes/ unpredictable events/ events that are outside routine variations. With that purpose in mind, the XmR chart includes two limits, Upper Nature Process Limit (UNPL) and Lower Natural Process Limit (LNPL). Any …

In this chapter, the author introduces two types of variation, predictable and unpredictable, and the improvement strategies applied to each variation respectively. XmR chart is also presented as a tool to distinguish the types of variation. However, the author does not explain why XmR chart works in this Chapter. This made me a bit confused …

This chapter is also basic. It is about some common summary statistics, relationships between ratios, percentages, and proportions, and data types. I am not going to cover the summary statistics here since I am sure you already know what is averages, medians, ranges, root mean square deviations, and standard deviations. The relationship between ratios, percentages, …

I think Chapters 4, 5, 6 are some general introduction to visualization. Although at this stage, I haven’t completed Chapter 6 and onward, I think the chapters are to prepare readers for more advanced topics and the author put those chapters in for completeness. The summary of Chapter 5 is actually simple: less is more. …

Chapter 4 covers some basic charts that will be used to visualize data. I think most of my readers would know those charts very well. But, I would still like to recap some important points. Still, I learned some new things as well, such as Pareto Charts, and recalled some old memory in high school …

In Chapter 2, the author introduces tools to visualize systems and processes. It mainly covers Brainstorming, Flowchart, Deployment Flowchart, PERT Diagram, Cause-and-Effect Diagram. It may seem elementary. But I still find it rewarding, and I have summarized the learnings in the following paragraphs. First, honesty is a prerequisite for useful flowcharts. I think you may …

Chapter 2 discusses how to visualize processes and systems. Chapter 3 talks about some issues in collecting data so that we can avoid them when analyzing systems. The chapter mainly consists of three parts: general requirements to collect good data, definitions that are operational, and some common pitfalls in interpreting data collected. For the first …