II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Data:
 Data is a collection of characters, numbers, and other symbols that represents values of some situations or variables.
 Data is plural and singular of the word data is “datum”.
 The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution led by computer, mobile and Internet has resulted in
generation of large volume of data and at a very fast pace.

Example of data:
 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.

Importance of Data (in competitive business environment)

 In ATM transactions, the bank needs to debit or credit the amount from the linked account.
 In dynamic pricing concept used by airlines and railway, they decide the price based on relationships between demand and
supply.
 The cab booking Apps increase or decrease the price based on demand for cabs at a particular time.
 Restaurants offer discounted price by analysing sales data at different time periods.

Importance of Data (in other environment)

 Voting data in electronic voting machines are accumulated to declare election results.
 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).
 Weather alerts are generated by analysing data received from various satellites.
 The meteorological offices continuously keep on monitoring satellite data for any upcoming cyclone or heavy rain.

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

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

a) 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.
 Each row represents data of an observation for different attributes.

Example 1: structured data about kitchen items in a shop

Example 2: Attributes maintained for different activities

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Example 3: structured data about student details

Reg_Number Sname Class Section TotalMarks
200021 abc II PUC A 590
700654 xyz I PUC B 560
309983 mno II PUC A 470

b) Unstructured Data: data, which are not in the traditional row and column structure, is called unstructured data.
Example:
 Web pages consisting of text as well as multimedia contents (image, graphics, audio/video).
 Text documents.
 Business reports, books.
 audio/video files,
 Social media messages.

Metadata: Metadata is basically data about data.

Example:
 Subject, recipient, main body, attachment, etc. are the metadata for the email data.
 Image size (in KB or MB), image type (for example, JPEG, PNG), image resolution, etc. are the metadata for an image file.

Data Collection
 For processing data, it is required to collect or gather data first.
 Data collection means identifying already available data or collecting from the appropriate sources.
 This data can be stored in a file or database for later use.
 Three different possible scenarios to collect data are given below
 Data are available in a diary or register.
 Data are already available in a digital format, say in a CSV (comma separated values) file.
 The data are not recorded in any format.
 Interactions with digital medium are continuously generating huge volumes of data.
For example:
 Hospitals are collecting data about patients for improving their services.
 Shopping malls are collecting data about the items being purchased by people.
 A political analyst, analyses the data in the social media posts and messages to see public opinion.
 Organizations like World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) are collecting data related to various economic
parameters from different countries for making economic forecasts.
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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Data storage:
 Data storage is the process of storing data on storage devices so that data can be retrieved later.
 Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD), CD/DVD, Tape Drive, Pen Drive, Memory Card, etc are the digital storage devices
used to store data.
 Different type of data are stored in these devices as data files.
 Database Management System (DBMS) is used to add, modify, delete, process data in these data files to get results.

Data Processing
 Converting data into meaningful information, results is called as data processing.
 These results are used to make conclusions and in decision-making.

Example: automated data processing in

 online bill payment
 registration of complaints
 Booking tickets etc.

Data processing system: The software, computer that converts data into meaningful information, results is called as data processing
system.

Data processing cycle: Data processing cycle includes the following stages/steps

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Steps in data processing

 Input
 Processing
 Output

1) Input
 First step is to collect or gather the required data.
 Once data is collected, it is prepared and given (data entry) to data processing system.

2) Processing
 Collected data need to be processed to get results and information.
 This stage includes steps like storing, retrieving, classifying, updating etc.

3) Output:
 This step includes reports, results, processing system.
 The reports and results are used in decision-making.

Statistical Techniques for Data Processing

 The data need to be processed to get information.
 Statistics is a mathematical method to collect, summarize data.
 Summarization methods are applied on tabular data for its easy understanding.

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Commonly used statistical techniques for data summarization are given below:
1) Measures of Central Tendency
2) Measures of Variability

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.
 Mean, median and mode of the data are calculated to get an idea about average, middle value and frequency of occurrence of a
particular value, respectively.

a) Mean
 Mean is the average of numeric values of an attribute.
 Mean is also called average.
 Mean is not a suitable choice if there are outliers in the data.
 An outlier is an exceptionally large or small value, in comparison to other values of the data.

Example 1:

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Example 2: Find the mean of numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

 Add all numbers to find the sum
Sum=1+2+3+4+5
Sum=15
Total numbers =5

 Divide the sum by total numbers

Mean=sum/total numbers
Mean=15/5
Mean=3

Example 3: Find the mean of numbers 3, 5, 8, 12

 Add all numbers to find the sum
Sum=3+5+8+12
Sum=28
Total numbers =4

 Divide the sum by total numbers

Mean=sum/total numbers
Mean=28/4
Mean=7

b) Median
 Median is 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.
 Median represents the central value at which the given data is equally divided into two parts.
 When there are odd number of values, then median is the value at the middle position.
 If the list has even number of values, then median is the average of the two middle values.

Example 1:
 Consider the data of height of students in a class as 90,102,110,115,85,90,100,110,110.
 Sort this data in ascending order as [85,90,90,100,102,110,110,110, 115]
 As there are total 9 values (odd number), the median is the value at position 5, that is 102 cm, whether counted from left to
right or from right to left.

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Example 2:
 Consider the numbers 1,2,3,4,5,6,7.
 As there are total 7 values (odd number), the median is the value at position 4, that is 4, whether counted from left to right or
from right to left.

Example 3:
 Consider the numbers 11, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30.
 As there are total 6 values (even number), the median is the average of two middle numbers 24 and 25.
 The median is 24.5.

c) Mode
 Value that appears most number of times in the given data of an attribute/variable is called Mode.
 It is computed based on frequency of occurrence of distinct values in the given data.
 A data set has no mode if each value occurs only once.
 There may be multiple modes in the data if more than one values have same highest frequency.
 Mode can be found for numeric as well as non-numeric data.

Example 1:
 Consider a list of values 90, 102, 110, 115, 85, 90, 100, 110, 110.
 Here mode is 110, as its frequency of occurrence in the list is 3, which is larger than the frequency of rest of the values.

Example 2:
 Consider a list of values 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 4, 4.
 Here mode is 4, count is 3.

Example 3:
 Consider a list of values 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 1, 1.
 Here mode is 5, count is 3.

Example 4:
 Consider a list of values 5, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 1, 1.
 Here mode is 1, 4, 5 and count is 2.

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Measures of Variability
 The measures of variability refer to the spread or variation of the values around the mean.
 They are also called measures of dispersion that indicate the degree of diversity in a data set.
 They also indicate difference within the group.
 Two different data sets can have the same mean, median or mode but completely different levels of dispersion, or vice versa.

Common measures of dispersion or variability are Range and Standard Deviation.

a) Range
 It is the difference between maximum and minimum values of the data (the largest value minus the smallest value).
 Range can be calculated only for numerical data.
 It is a measure of dispersion and tells about coverage/spread of data values.
 For example difference in salaries of employees, marks of a student, price of toys, etc.
 As range is calculated based on the two extreme values, any outlier in the data badly influences the result.
 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.

Example:
 Consider height of students in a class as 90,102,110,115,85,90,100,110,110 cm.
 Here minimum height value is 85 cm and maximum height value is 115 cm. Hence, range is 115-85 = 30 cm.

b) Standard deviation
 Standard deviation refers to differences within the group or set of data of a variable.
 Standard deviation measures the spread of data.
 Range uses only two extreme values in the data for calculation.
 Standard deviation considers all the given data for calculation.
 It is calculated as the positive square root of the average of squared difference of each value from the mean value of data.
 Smaller value of standard deviation means data are less spread while a larger value of standard deviation means data are more
spread.

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II PUC 2025-26 (New syllabus) Computer Science Chapter 7 Understanding Data

Example:

Dept. Of Computer Science, Sri Adichunchanagiri Ind PU college, Shivamogga 10