Book Image

Principles of Data Science - Second Edition

By : Sinan Ozdemir, Sunil Kakade, Marco Tibaldeschi
Book Image

Principles of Data Science - Second Edition

By: Sinan Ozdemir, Sunil Kakade, Marco Tibaldeschi

Overview of this book

Need to turn programming skills into effective data science skills? This book helps you connect mathematics, programming, and business analysis. You’ll feel confident asking—and answering—complex, sophisticated questions of your data, making abstract and raw statistics into actionable ideas. Going through the data science pipeline, you'll clean and prepare data and learn effective data mining strategies and techniques to gain a comprehensive view of how the data science puzzle fits together. You’ll learn fundamentals of computational mathematics and statistics and pseudo-code used by data scientists and analysts. You’ll learn machine learning, discovering statistical models that help control and navigate even the densest datasets, and learn powerful visualizations that communicate what your data means.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
16
Index

Structured versus unstructured data

The distinction between structured and unstructured data is usually the first question you want to ask yourself about the entire dataset. The answer to this question can mean the difference between needing three days or three weeks of time to perform a proper analysis.

The basic breakdown is as follows (this is a rehashed definition of organized and unorganized data in the first chapter):

  • Structured (organized) data: This is data that can be thought of as observations and characteristics. It is usually organized using a table method (rows and columns).
  • Unstructured (unorganized) data: This data exists as a free entity and does not follow any standard organization hierarchy.

Here are a few examples that could help you differentiate between the two:

  • Most data that exists in text form, including server logs and Facebook posts, is unstructured
  • Scientific observations, as recorded by careful scientists, are kept in a very neat and organized (structured) format
  • A...