In the previous course in this specialization, you conducted extract, transform, and load (ETL) to ensure your data was ready for the next phase of the data science process: analysis. In some cases, an analysis of the data may be the actual final goal of the project, or it may be an important intermediary step on the road to machine learning. In either case, analyzing your data using various techniques will help you obtain useful insights into that data and what it represents. It'll also give you a better understanding of how the data needs to undergo more processing to prepare it for machine learning. You'll begin your analysis efforts by exploring the nature of your dataset and the relationships it contains.