Principles of Data Science - Third Edition

2

Types of Data

For our first step into the world of data science, let’s take a look at the various ways in which data can be formed. In this chapter, we will explore three critical categorizations of data:

• Structured versus unstructured data
• Quantitative versus qualitative data
• The four levels of data

We will dive further into each of these topics by showing examples of how data scientists look at and work with data. This chapter aims to familiarize us with the fundamental types of data so that when we eventually see our first dataset, we will know exactly how to dissect, diagnose, and analyze the contents to maximize our insight value and machine learning performance.

The first thing to note is my use of the word data. In the previous chapter, ...