how to find relationships in dataset with multiple variables

573 Views Asked by At

I have a large project data set ,which includes numeric values like dollar amounts, and non numeric quantities like country codes, purpose codes etc I want to find relationships between the variables. What statistical tools should I research to be able to do that ? Should I always have an hypothesis before or can I find relationships in data in general ? I started looking into principal component analysis..but it seems that wont be very useful for non interval data.. am I right ? Should I look into multivariate regression ? The problem is I don`t even know which field or topic covers such an analysis.? Any pointers to how to begin my research would be appreciated