The many dimensions of data

Abstract

Do you feel safe walking around after dark? Does the size of the city affect how you feel? How do these feelings compare between men and women? For data analysts, these questions come with unwieldy amounts of data. Luckily, Dr Gianmarco Alberti from the Department of Criminology (Faculty of Social Wellbeing, University of Malta) has authored a free software that visually portrays data patterns in a practical way. So how does the software work? Going back to our safety in the dark example, the data is plugged into the software. The programme then explores how the feeling of safety relates to the size of the city. In this example, we’ll split the variable ‘feeling safe after dark’ by gender and see if it’s influenced by the number of people living in the city (‘town size’, represented at the top of the first image). The table below is small yet highly complex (see figure 1), finding any obvious pattern of association between categories is hardly an easy task. [excerpt]