rnative to this I quite like is that data analysis is <em>identifying a signal within noise</em>.</p>
<p>Data is noisy for many reasons. For one thing, the data that we have access to is generally limited, in the sense that we could have obtained other and/or more data. Other sources of noise include measurement error. Such sources of noise imply that the data set we have only gives a limited, incomplete, and corrupted view on the process that generated it (the Data Generating Process). We are not intereste