Concept · 3 steps · NESA SC4-DA1-01

What Is Data

The doorway into the whole data-science thread — from "wait, steps walked is data?" all the way to spotting the moment a number is secretly a label. Three short steps, each with its own toy to play with.

1 Where it comes fromData is just recorded observations, and it's everywhere. Drag values into bins: categorical or numerical, then discrete or continuous. 2 How to do itThe two questions that name any value's type, and how a dataset becomes a table where every column is one type. 3 Where it gets trickyNumbers that are really labels, ordered categories hiding in plain sight, and why age is still continuous.

← This concept rests on

Foundational — the Start of the Data-science Thread

→ It unlocks

Collecting & Organising Datasets
Picturing & Analysing Data