Exploring data analysis methods
As highlighted at the outset of this chapter, the task of gathering and exploring these various sources of data can seem somewhat daunting. So, you may be wondering at this point where and how to begin the data analysis process? To answer this question, let’s explore some of the methods we can use to analyze your data and prepare it for the ML task.
Gathering the data
One of the first steps to getting started with a data analysis task is to gather the relevant data from various silos into a specific location. This single location is commonly referred to as a data lake. Once the relevant data has been co-located into a single data lake, the activity of moving data in or out of the lake becomes significantly easier.
For example, let’s imagine for a moment that a data scientist is tasked with building a product recommendation model. Using the data lake as a central store, they can query a customer database to get all the customer...
