Research into Data Analytics - Katie

According to Anil Maheshwari, “anything that is recorded is data. Observations and facts are data.” Once you start to collate together this data, whether qualitative or quantitative, you will start to build a database. A database is a “modelled collection of data that is accessible in many ways.” It “abstracts the key entities involved in an action and their relationships.” Analytics is about organising and analysing the data so that you can easily discover patterns and connections that were previously unclear. These insights are then used to create predictions about the future that will allow you to create informed decisions in the future. This is key to this whole process: creating actionable items based on analysis of the facts.

How visualise this data is essential as well. A poor visualisation may lead to future errors during analysis and prevent collaborators from being able to understand the insights you’re trying to provide.

Despite Maheshwari’s book being billed a book made to make data “accessible”, I found it extremely dense and not at all beginner friendly. The video by CareerFoundry linked below to be more helpful in helping me to understand this topic as it helped bring it down to a level I could apply to our project. While it’s difficult to understand such a complicated subject in such a short time frame, it’s an essential learning outcome. If we can understand data analytics through the collating, cleaning, analysing and sharing of data from our user feedback, maybe we gain new insights into how these AI systems can function. I especially appreciated how this video explains how cleaning data is often the most laborious part of the process yet one of the most important, as it prevents you from integrating errors or unwanted data points into your analysis and provides structure to the whole database structure. 

References: 

Anil Maheshwari. (2014). Data Analytics Made Accessible.

A Beginners Guide To The Data Analysis Process. (CareerFoundry.). www.youtube.com. Retrieved December 5, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCNTuLBMK4#ddg-play

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