CHAPTER - 7
UNDERSTANDING DATA
Data are indeed crucial for decision making. Data need to be
gathered, processed and analysed for making decisions. Data is a
collection of characters, numbers, and other symbols that
represents values of some situations or variables.
The following list contains some examples of data that we often
come across.
• Name, age, gender, contact details, etc., of a person
• Transactions data generated through banking,
ticketing, shopping, etc. whether online or offline
• Images, graphics, animations, audio, video
• Documents and web pages
• Online posts, comments and messages
• Signals generated by sensors
•Satellite data including meteorological data, communication data,
earth observation data, etc.
IMPORTANTS OF DATA:
❖ Human beings rely on data for making decisions. Besides, large
amount of data when processed with the help of a computer,
show us the possibilities or hidden traits which are otherwise not
visible to humans.
❖ The meteorological offices continuously keep on monitoring
satellite data for any upcoming cyclone or heavy rain.
❖ It is important for business organisations to continuously
monitor and analyse market behaviour with respect to their
products and take actions accordingly. Besides, companies
identify customer demands as well as feedbacks, and make
changes in their products or services accordingly.
❖ The electronic voting machines are used for recording the votes
cast. Subsequently, the voting data from all the machines are
accumulated to declare election results in a short time as
compared to manual counting of ballot papers.
❖ Scientists record data while doing experiments to calculate and
compare results.
❖ Pharmaceutical companies record data while trying out a new
medicine to see its effectiveness.
❖ Libraries maintain data about books in the library and the
membership of the library.
❖ The search engines give us results after analysing large volume
of data available on the websites across World Wide Web (www).
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❖ Weather alerts are generated by analysing data received from
various satellites.
TYPES OF DATA:
Two broad categories in which data can be classified on the basis of
their format are:
(A) Structured Data.
(B) Unstructured Data.
Structured Data:-
Data which is organised and can be recorded in a well defined
format is called structured data. Data is usually stored in computer
in a tabular (in rows and columns) format where each column
represents different data for a particular parameter called attribute/
characteristic/variable and each row represents data of
an observation for different attributes.
Unstructured Data:-
Data which are not in the traditional row and column structure is
called unstructured data. Unstructured data are sometimes
described with the help of some other data called metadata.
Metadata is basically data about data.
Examples of unstructured data include web pages consisting of text
as well as multimedia contents (image, graphics, audio/video).
These are the metadata for the email data. Likewise, we can have
some metadata for an image file as image size (in KB or MB), image
type (for example, JPEG, PNG), image resolution, etc.
DATA COLLECTION:-
Data collection here means identifying already available data or
collecting from the appropriate sources. Interactions with digital
medium are continuously generating huge volumes of data. For
example organisations like World Bank and International Monetary
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Fund (IMF) are collecting data related to various economic
parameters from different countries for making economic forecasts.
DATA STORAGE:-
Data storage is the process of storing data on storage devices so
that data can be retrieved later. There are numerous digital storage
devices available in the market like, Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid
State Drive (SSD), CD/DVD, Tape Drive, Pen Drive, Memory Card,
[Link] use computers to add, modify or delete data in these files or
process these data files to get results.
DATA PROCESSING:-
Data need to be processed to get results and after analysing those
results, we make conclusions or decisions.
Statistical techniques for data Processing:-
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There are various techniques which help us to have preliminary
understanding about the data. Summarisation methods are applied
on tabular data for its easy comprehension. Commonly used
statistical techniques for data summarisation are given below:
1. Measures of Central Tendency:- A measure of central
tendency is a single value that gives us some idea about the data.
Three most common measures of central tendency are the mean,
median, and mode.
A) Mean :- Mean is simply the average of numeric values of an
attribute. Mean is also called average.
B) Median :- Median is also computed for a single attribute/variable
at a time. When all the values are sorted in ascending or
descending order, the middle value is called the Median.
(C) Mode :- Value that appears most number of times in the given
data of an attribute/variable is called Mode. Mode can be found for
numeric as well as non-numeric data.
[Link] of Variability:- The measures of variability refer to
the spread or variation of the values around the mean. They also
indicate difference within the group. Common measures of
dispersion or variability are Range and Standard Deviation.
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A) Range :- It is the difference between maximum and minimum
value of the data (the largest value minus the smallest value).
Range can be calculated only for numerical data.
Let M be the largest or maximum value and S is the smallest or
minimum value in the data, then Range is the difference between
two extreme values i.e. M – S or Maximum – Minimum.
B) Standard deviation :- Standard deviation refers to differences
within the group or set of data of a variable. It is calculated as the
positive square root of the average of squared difference of each
value from the mean value of data. Given n values x1, x2, x3,...xn,
and their mean x, the standard deviation, represented as σ (greek
letter sigma) is computed as :
1. Find Mean, Median, Mode, Range and Standard Deviation for
following data
Heights (cm): [90,102,110,115,85,90,100,110,110]
Sum = 912, n = 9
Mean = 912/9 = 101.33 cm
Sorted heights: [85,90,90,100,102,110,110,110,115]
n = 9 (odd)
Median = 5th value = 102 cm
Heights: Mode = 110 cm (frequency = 3)
Range: Heights: Min = 85, Max = 115, Range = 115-85 = 30 cm
STANDARDED DEVIATION
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