Intelligent Data Analysis

2Data: Its Nature and Modern Data Analytical Tools

Ravinder Ahuja, Shikhar Asthana, Ayush Ahuja, and Manu Agarwal

Computer Science and Engineering Department, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, India

2.1 Introduction

Data is a collection of values that pertain to qualitative or quantitative variables. Data is a vital and irreplaceable asset to any form of an organization or an enterprise. From the smallest scale, up to a multinational corporation, data is always omnipresent. Whether it's internal to the four walls of the organization or outside, data is always there – just waiting to be organized and analyzed. Data without any processing or order, in its most primitive form, is called raw data [1]. In essence, raw data is just an unordered set of qualitative or quantitative variables with very little or no processing done. Even though raw data has a major perspective of becoming “information,” it requires selective extraction, formatting, organizing, and analysis for transforming itself into it. For example, a broker transaction terminal in a busy open stock market collects huge volumes of raw data each day, but this data, even though having the capacity to, does not yield much information until it has undergone processing. Once processed, the data may indicate the specific units of stock that each buyer or seller has bought or sold, respectively. Hence, from the raw data, we get processed data, from which we get information, and from this information, we derive ...