Introduction – Bivariate Data

This title does look forbidding, but believe me it’s not really that difficult. Bivariate data simply means data where the information comes in pairs of numbers, each from a different source, in other words, each number is a different variable. It could be that one number is the amount of money spent on advertising a particular product and the other is the value of the sales made as a result.

As usual, a first step to analysing this sort of information is often to draw a graph. The kind of graph most usually associated with the analysis of bivariate data is the scattergraph or scatter diagram.