Multidimensional panel data

Imagine you have a toy box with different toys inside. Each toy has a different color, size, and shape. Now imagine you want to study how much time you play with each toy in the box over a period of time, say one week.

You decide to take notes each day on the toy you played with and for how long. This creates a list of information that tells you which toy you played with on which day, and for how long. This information can be saved in a table, where each row represents one day and each column represents a different toy attribute (color, size, and shape) and the duration of playtime.

However, you also want to know how other factors, like the weather or the mood you were in, could affect the amount of time you played with each toy. In order to capture this information, you need to add more columns to your table, each representing a different factor that could influence your playtime, such as the weather and your mood.

The resulting table would contain many different columns, one for each toy attribute, and additional ones that represent the external factors that might influence playtime, such as the weather and mood. This type of table with multiple dimensions (columns) is often referred to as multidimensional panel data.

Multidimensional panel data is used by researchers to study various phenomena, ranging from the performance of companies over time to the health outcomes of patients in a clinical trial. By analyzing multidimensional panel data, researchers can explore how different factors interact to produce particular outcomes, and how those outcomes change over time.