Saturday, 9 August 2014

What is Data?

My Earlier Blog was focused on Data Analysis which is the main subject of Analyst’s Digest.
imagesThis blog explains the meaning of data. People must have learned the basic definition that Data is a collection of records. My question is what are these records, what constitutes a record?
Record is nothing but certain pieces of things set in writing or typed or stored in some kind of storage devices for later references. These records when pile up forms data. “BIG DATA”. Lets get into Data then.
Data is a collection of Facts be they assumed or known & Statistics such as values or measurements. More precisely Data consists of texts, numbers, descriptive or non descriptive records, boolean values that are true or false, comments, status, etc.
Moreover Data can be qualitative (that is descriptive, argumentative) or quantitative (Statistical, Numeric). Data takes various forms when we look into its most basic format which is raw. Data in quantitative form may be discrete or continuous. The Continuous data is easy to simplify into meaningful form.
Till Now we have talked about various forms of data. But readers might be wondering that where does this data come from? What leads to such big and cluttered data?
Data gets collected by several means or say procedures.
1.) Observation or Survey. For example – Scientific Experiments, Survey of population etc.
2.) Collecting Information. For Example – Attendance in a school, Work Status in a corporate.
3.) Providing Solutions and Services – For Example – Keeping Various trackers in a corporate company for the work delivered to a customer.
4.) Emailing – Gmail , Yahoo etc. Mails = Data.
So Data can be biological, environmental, Scientific, agricultural, academic etc.
My next blog will highlight some broader aspects of data analysis. Till then keep on playing with data and try to come up with new and unknown algorithms, models to filter meaningful information.

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