The simplest form of data
A table is probably the simplest form of data. Surprisingly, most implementations of data science algorithms still today use tabular data as inputs. Data scientists prefer to convert any type of complex data — such as text, image, or time series — to tables to make sure that existing tools can be leveraged for analysis.
As an example, let us say that a company keeps information about its employees in an excel table. Here is the table.
| Name | Salary ($) | Age (Years) |
| Jane | 90000 | 52 |
| John | 85000 | 48 |
| Delilah | 75000 | 32 |
| Dave | 90000 | 53 |
| Ellen | 82000 | 44 |
One reason for the popularity of tabular representation is the ease in storing the tabular data directly in the main memory of the computer. Regardless of the number of rows or columns, a tabular dataset can always be stored in a 2-dimensional array. We will discuss more on this in the upcoming lessons.
15 Comments
I understand some thing about data, thanks
very good teacher , may u progress more
Data is a vepon for information
Wow its such a big opportunity to take on this course, I’m so glad
wow Data is speaking now
now i know data can speak
I now see how data can work and analyze things
I now see how data can speak and analyse things
I am glad that you liked the content. Have wonderful week.
As a student of Journalism and Media Studies I have enrolled myself this course. From the first introductory video of data has reshaped my views of figuring out something to collect data from a table. Hope this course will be fruitful for me, as I am going to take part in future journalistic research of verification.
Best regards,
sir
I am glad to know that the content was helpful. I hope the future videos will be helpful as well. I wish you good luck.
Thank you for enrolling and commenting.
Thanks for creating this free opportunity for learning Data science.
Thank you for the kind words. Have a wonderful week ahead.
I am trilled about the information provided. How do we work with complex data such as text or images?
Hi David,
That is a great question. We convert text to tabular data. There are document modeling techniques to do that. At some point, we will include lessons on text modeling. With images, there are approaches to extract features to form tabular data. We have plans to cover that too.
Thank you! Have a wonderful week.
Best regards,
Shahriar