A retail analytics company is analyzing a large dataset containing customer purchase history, product details, and sales trends to gain insights into customer behavior and optimize inventory management. To achieve this, the team is focused on calculating various statistical measures to summarize data characteristics and using visualizations to uncover patterns and trends. These tasks are critical for understanding the underlying structure and dynamics of the data before proceeding to model development or predictive analysis. Which phase of the data science process does this work primarily belong to?