Predict customer churn? 5 Simple Steps for Beginning to Conduct Exploratory Data Analysis in Data Science

Roger Babecki
3 min readApr 26, 2023

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I recently had to perform Exploratory Data Analysis on a dataset of financial transactions. My initial approach was to simply print out the raw data and start looking for patterns. After a few hours of pouring through the data, I realized that this approach was too labor intensive and that I was missing out on a lot of useful insights.

So I decided to take a better approach. I started by plotting the data into various graphs and charts. This allowed me to quickly identify trends, outliers, and relationships between the different variables. After I had an understanding of the data, I was able to refine my analysis and focus on the areas that were the most relevant and important.

In the end, this approach was much more successful and saved me a ton of time. I was able to gain valuable insights that I never would have found if I had stuck with my initial approach.

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My Predict customer churn? 5 Simple Steps for Beginning to Conduct Exploratory Data Analysis in Data Science

  1. Gather and Visualize Your Data: One of the first steps to conduct exploratory data analysis in data science is to gather and visualize your data. This helps you to get a better understanding of the data and to identify patterns. For example, you can use a scatter plot to visualize customer churn data to identify any correlations between customer churn and other factors, such as customer spending, customer age, and customer location.
  2. Analyze the Distributions of Your Data: A key part of exploratory data analysis is to analyze the distributions of your data. You can use histograms or box plots to get an idea of how different variables are distributed in the data set. For example, if you’re analyzing customer churn data, you can use a box plot to see how customer churn rates vary with customer age or customer spending.
  3. Identify Outliers: Outliers are values that are very different from the rest of the data. Identifying outliers in your data set can help you uncover potential errors or anomalies in the data. For example, if you’re analyzing customer churn data, you can use a scatter plot to identify any customers who have unusually high or low churn rates.
  4. Test for Correlations: Testing for correlations is an important step in exploratory data analysis. You can use a correlation matrix to test for correlations between different variables, such as customer age and customer churn. This can help you identify any potential relationships between customer churn and other factors.
  5. Build Predictive Models: After you’ve conducted exploratory data analysis, you can use the insights you’ve gained to build predictive models. For example, you can use customer churn data to build a machine learning model to predict which customers are likely to churn.

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Roger Babecki

I love solving tough problems and breaking down complex topics in data science.