Exploratory Analysis and the Expected Value of Experimentation

It is increasingly easy to acquire a large amount of data about a problem before formulating a hypothesis. The idea of exploratory data analysis (EDA) predates this situation, but many researchers find themselves appealing to EDA as an explanation of what they are doing with these new resources. Yet there has been relatively little explicit work on what EDA is or why it might be important. I canvass several positions in the literature, find them wanting, and suggest an alternative: exploratory data analysis, when done well, shows the expected value of experimentation for a particular hypothesis.