Data Science I - Data Everywhere

Data science is the study of data to extract insights and develop strategies for businesses and industries.

So you want to learn about Data Science - one of the most in demand jobs in the industry. Well you've come to the right place. Before we can dive into data science as a whole, we first need to understand the "data" part of it.

Data Everywhere

What is data? IBM defines data as -

"Data is a collection of facts, numbers, words, observations or other useful information."

In other words data is everything you can measure. It can be abstract ideas (like customer satisfaction scores) or concrete measurements (like sales figures).

Lets look at an example of data - the marks of students.

Name	Subject	Marks (in %)
Alice	Math	85
George	Science	75
Maria	English	90
Alice	Science	70
Maria	Math	60

Here we have a set of data of the marks of these students. Using this data we can do some operations, like finding the average marks of each student for Math, Science and English or we can find the student with the highest total marks across all subjects.

The are many more types of data for example:

• Raw Numbers: Sales numbers from company data, Weather values on different days, Heights of different athletes.

• Text: Text from books, journals, textbooks, newspapers, etc.

• Images: Pictures taken by a digital camera, Screenshots of your phone screen, etc.

Types of Data

It is important to understand data first before jumping into the "science" part of it. Without proper understanding of data we might analyze it in a wrong way and our findings will be meaningless.

Data has changed the way companies and businesses in the modern age operate. Without a proper understanding of data, you risk falling behind your competitors. We live in a fast-paced world and as such we need to understand how to improve our business as fast as possible. Data Science is the key to figuring out the path to success and making sure that path is as factual and accurate as possible.