A quick look at our data

In this chapter, we will use some real-life data provided by Eurostat, the official EU office for statistics. Eurostat has a wealth of databases available on its website. For our learning project, we'll take a look at the unemployment numbers—with the EU's economy growing after a long recession, these stats should be quite interesting. Various EU employment and unemployment figures can be downloaded from http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs/data/database. We'll be using the Unemployment by sex and age – monthly average dataset.

You don't need to download this because a better structured dataset is provided in this chapter's support files. However, if you're curious and want to take a look, you can get the raw data from under the Employment and unemployment (Labour force survey) category | LFS main indicators subcategory | Unemployment - LFS adjusted series folder.

I've also customized the data by using thousand persons for the unit of measure (the default is percentage...