Summary

In this chapter, we presented an overview of the data analysis ecosystem, explaining basic concepts of the data analysis process, tools, and some insight into the practical applications of the data analysis. We have also provided an overview of the different kinds of data; numerical and categorical. We got into the nature of data, structured (databases, logs, and reports) and unstructured (image collections, social networks, and text mining). Then, we introduced the importance of data visualization and how a fine visualization can help us in the exploratory data analysis. Finally we explored some of the concepts of big data and social networks analysis.

In the next chapter, we will work with data, cleaning, processing, and transforming, using Python and OpenRefine.