ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Panel data

Panel data is like taking pictures of the same thing over and over again. Imagine you have a toy car and you take pictures of it every day for a week. After taking these pictures, you can see how the car changes over time. This is called panel data because you have data that is taken over multiple periods (in this case, days).

Now, let's say you want to study something about this car, like how many times it moves each day. If you only take one picture, you can't see how the car moves over time. But if you take pictures every day, you can see if the car moves a lot or a little each day.

Panel data is useful in studying how things change over time. In real life, we can take pictures of many different things over time, like cars, people, or even countries. By collecting data over multiple periods, we can see patterns that we wouldn't be able to see from just one moment in time.

So essentially, panel data is just a term to describe data that is collected over time, like taking pictures of the same thing over and over again. It helps us to better understand how things change over time and to make more accurate predictions about future changes.