SmartEDA: An R Package for Automated Exploratory Data Analysis

This paper introduces SmartEDA, which is an R package for performing Exploratory data analysis (EDA). EDA is generally the first step that one needs to perform before developing any machine learning or statistical models. The goal of EDA is to help someone perform the initial investigation to know more about the data via descriptive statistics and visualizations. In other words, the objective of EDA is to summarize and explore the data. The need for EDA became one of the factors that led to the development of various statistical computing packages over the years including the R programming language that is a very popular and currently the most widely used software for statistical computing. However, EDA is a very tedious task, requires some manual effort and some of the open source packages available in R are not just upto the mark. In this paper, we propose a new open source package i.e. SmartEDA for R to address the need for automation of exploratory data analysis. We discuss the various features of SmartEDA and illustrate some of its applications for generating actionable insights using a couple of real-world datasets. We also perform a comparative study of SmartEDA with respect to other packages available for exploratory data analysis in the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN).