Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By : Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar
Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By: Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar

Overview of this book

Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service. This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Data sources


Data source is a term for all the technology related to the extraction and storage of data. A data source can be anything from a simple text file to a big database. The raw data can come from observation logs, sensors, transactions, or user behavior.

A dataset is a collection of data, usually presented in a tabular form. Each column represents a particular attribute, and each row corresponds to a given member of the data, as is showed in the following screenshot.

In this section, we will take a look at the most common forms for data sources and datasets.

Tip

The data in the preceding screenshot is from the classical Weather dataset of the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

A dataset represents a logical implementation of a data source; the common features of a dataset:

  • Dataset characteristics (multivariate and univariate)

  • Number of instances

  • Area (life, business, and many more)

  • Attribute characteristics (real, categorical, and nominal)

  • Number of...