In Chapter 6, Data Acquisition and Mapping, we discussed how to acquire data as well as how to generate them by means of machine-listening techniques. It is also often the case that we need to analyze non-audio signals or data collections of some sort. However, data analysis stands for an infinite range of operations we may perform on some collection; additionally, it is often the case that we blindly probe the collection for potentially interesting patterns rather than looking for something in particular. Dealing with such cases in real-life projects would be overwhelming if there were no generalized methodologies that serve as the starting point.
Fortunately, there is already a kind of science dedicated to the systemic study of the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of any kind of data, namely statistics. As such, it provides us with a very sophisticated background to perform analyses and feature extraction of various sorts. By applying statistical...