I'm not sure about you but I have heard this a lot lately, "data is the new oil"! Ever came across questions like, Why and even How? I mean how can data, which is not even a physical entity, be compared with oil? That's where you learn to "not take things in a literal sense every time".
What is Data?
To be precise and technical, data can be considered as raw facts and figures. Data has no patterns, no configurations, no setup, it is just raw facts and figures spread all around.
The next obvious question should be, "If data is just raw facts and figures, how can it be so important"? It makes sense! But what if we convert this data into something valuable? Something that can be used to make business decisions? Something that can be used to make applications? Something that can be used to enhance the user experience? This is where the term "information" comes in!
Data can be processed in numerous ways and for individual needs. Different people can process the same data and end up with different pieces of information that serve different purposes. For a group of people, a set of data can be of great significance, and at the same time, the same data can mean nothing for a different group of people. It is just about what their end goal is? What do they want to make from this data?
What would be your answer, if I asked you how you spend a normal day in your life on the Internet? Some would say, we watch entertainment shows, some would say we play online multiplayer games, some would say read e-books, some would say we just scroll through the news feed, and some would say we check for different products on e-shopping websites, the list is endless! Everyone has their own way of using the Internet and they don't have time to think about what's happening under the hood! On any random day, if you click on any website or navigate to certain links, your data is constantly being collected.
The OTT platforms want to know what you like watching so that they can make appropriate suggestions. Same goes with the online shopping websites, e-books, and frankly everything! This all comes under "enriching the user experience"!
Sometimes you search for something on the Internet and a while later, your YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and any other website you visit contains the ads for that particular product or service you searched for! This is nothing but your data being captured and processed for the companies that want you to buy that particular product or service from them!
Relationship between Data and Machine Learning
It would not be wrong to state that Data is of the utmost importance when we talk Machine Learning algorithms. The algorithms are pre-built and can be fine-tuned but they need valid and consistent data foremost! A machine learning model is as good as the data it has been trained on. In general, the more data is fed to the machine learning model, the better it learns but exceptional cases do exist! This is where data preprocessing and enriching come in and I will talk about it in upcoming posts.
The main takeaway here is, data has an inevitable role to play in Machine Learning concepts and this digital life. We can't overlook the fact that it can be misused as well, one should be very careful while surfing and entering data on the Internet because at the end, it is just a matter of few clicks! We may just as well say, "a data revolution is coming up"!