Working with Data

Abstract

Data is the starting point for all data mining—without it there is nothing to mine. In today's world, there is certainly no shortage of data, but turning that data into information, knowledge, and, eventually, wisdom is not a simple matter. We often think of data as being numbers or categories. But data can also be text, images, videos, and sounds. Data mining generally only deals with numbers and categories. Often, the other forms of data can be mapped into numbers and categories if we wish to analyse them using the approaches we present here.