Week 5, October 23: Analysis, part II – Grouped Analysis

Pre-class reading

• PAC Track: What and Where are the Super PACs Spending?, by Al Shaw and Kim Barker, 2012
• Independent Spending Totals, by Kevin Quealy and Derek Willis, 2012

What we’ll cover

• Grouping data using pivot tables in spreadsheet software.
• Grouping data using SQL in database software.
• Outliers, sample size, and the law of large numbers.

Post-class assignments

• Clean, analyze, and visualize the “independent expenditures” filed with the FEC so far in the 2014 election cycle. Try grouping the data by organization, candidate, office sought, and expenditure date. Keep a log of the steps you took, and the decisions you made. Write a few paragraphs summarizing your findings.
• CodeCademy Web Fundamentals: jQuery