A question that seems like it should be easy to answer, but isn’t necessarily, is just what is data? ‘Numbers’ may be the first thing that leaps to mind, and that’s often true, but there’s plenty out there that isn’t, as there are a lot of other things that can be analysed. There are product reviews left by customers, the weather outside, and even sounds or pictures.
The truth is, there is no single, easy to provide answer to this, although one that gets close is quite simple: everything! Any fact, any observation, anything that can be analysed and used to extract information from. Take a previous example, sound. We could take a look at someone’s listening history on their preferred music platform, to generate a playlist of new music for them. This may seem obvious, as almost every user has a favourite artist or a favourite decade. But there’s other information buried within the sound that can be used as well that might not be immediately obvious. Perhaps the user will skip past any track in a minor key, or has no time for anything below 130 bpm. If that’s the case, there may be no point in even offering them the latest track by their favourite singer, if it happens to be a mawkish ballad but what they really want to do is be out raving.
Earlier I also mentioned pictures, so let’s take another example, where perhaps a long-hidden painting has turned up but the artist is unknown. If that's the case, we’d want to use as much data as possible to discover who painted it. Tests could be run on it to identify it as from a particular century, and the location of its discovery would obviously be useful, but also helpful would be the style of the image, the type of paint used, the range of colours. All of this is data, and all of it can be used now to make a prediction.
It’s true to say, of course, that most data can be expressed as numbers - after all, almost all our data processing and analysis is done using computers, which at a fundamental level store everything as a collection of zeroes and ones. But next time you're outside, take a look around, and just see what could be ripe for analysis!