Data

In God we trust, all others bring data.

—William Edwards Deming

Data is a broad term that refers to facts, statistics, or information in a raw, unprocessed, or organized form. Data can take many forms, including numbers, text, images, audio recordings, and more. Data is the foundation of machine learning and is critical to the success of any ML model.

Important

As a rule, machine learning models can deal only with data in numeric form. Hence, an important question when discussing data in relation to ML is how to convert different data types to numbers. In many cases, converting data to numeric form is straightforward, however, it can become tricky when dealing with more complex data types.