Introduction to Data in Machine Learning

DATA: It can be any unprocessed fact, value, text, sound, or picture that is not being interpreted and analyzed. Data is the most important part of all Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence. Without data, we can’t train any model and all modern research and automation will go in vain. Big Enterprises are spending lots of money just to gather as much certain data as possible.

Example: Why did Facebook acquire WhatsApp by paying a huge price of $19 billion?
The answer is very simple and logical – it is to have access to the users’ information that Facebook may not have but WhatsApp will have. This information of their users is of paramount importance to Facebook as it will facilitate the task of improvement in their services.

INFORMATION: Data that has been interpreted and manipulated and has now some meaningful inference for the users.

KNOWLEDGE: Combination of inferred information, experiences, learning, and insights. Results in awareness or concept building for an individual or organization.

How we split data in Machine Learning?

• Training Data: The part of data we use to train our model. This is the data that your model actually sees(both input and output) and learns from.

• Validation Data: The part of data that is used to do a frequent evaluation of the model, fit on the training dataset along with improving involved hyperparameters (initially set parameters before the model begins learning). This data plays its part when the model is actually training.

• Testing Data: Once our model is completely trained, testing data provides an unbiased evaluation. When we feed in the inputs of Testing data, our model will predict some values(without seeing actual output). After prediction, we evaluate our model by comparing it with the actual output present in the testing data. This is how we evaluate and see how much our model has learned from the experiences feed in as training data, set at the time of training.
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Properties of Data –

1. Volume: Scale of Data. With the growing world population and technology at exposure, huge data is being generated each and every millisecond.
2. Variety: Different forms of data – healthcare, images, videos, audio clippings.
3. Velocity: Rate of data streaming and generation.
4. Value: Meaningfulness of data in terms of information that researchers can infer from it.
5. Veracity: Certainty and correctness in data we are working on.

Some facts about Data:

• As compared to 2005, 300 times i.e. 40 Zettabytes (1ZB=10^21 bytes) of data will be generated by 2020.
• By 2011, the healthcare sector has a data of 161 Billion Gigabytes
• 400 Million tweets are sent by about 200 million active users per day
• Each month, more than 4 billion hours of video streaming are done by the users.
• 30 Billion different types of content are shared every month by the user.
• It is reported that about 27% of data is inaccurate and so 1 in 3 business idealists or leaders don’t trust the information on which they are making decisions.