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Data mining is a particular data analysis technique that focuses on statistical modeling and knowledge discovery for predictive rather than purely descriptive purposes, while business intelligence covers data analysis that relies heavily on aggregation, focusing mainly on business information. [4]
Tukey defined data analysis in 1961 as: "Procedures for analyzing data, techniques for interpreting the results of such procedures, ways of planning the gathering of data to make its analysis easier, more precise or more accurate, and all the machinery and results of (mathematical) statistics which apply to analyzing data."
Two main statistical methods are used in data analysis: descriptive statistics, which summarize data from a sample using indexes such as the mean or standard deviation, and inferential statistics, which draw conclusions from data that are subject to random variation (e.g., observational errors, sampling variation). [4]
A mean is a quantity representing the "center" of a collection of numbers and is intermediate to the extreme values of the set of numbers. [1] There are several kinds of means (or "measures of central tendency") in mathematics, especially in statistics.
The data from a study can also be analyzed to consider secondary hypotheses inspired by the initial results, or to suggest new studies. A secondary analysis of the data from a planned study uses tools from data analysis, and the process of doing this is mathematical statistics. Data analysis is divided into:
Analytic study: A statistical study in which action will be taken on the process or cause-system that produced the frame being studied. The aim being to improve practice in the future. (In a statistical study, the frame is the set from which the sample is taken.)
Data is gathered for the purpose of answering a question, or more specifically, a research question. Univariate data does not answer research questions about relationships between variables, but rather it is used to describe one characteristic or attribute that varies from observation to observation. [5]
If the data set is a statistical sample (a subset of the population), it is called the sample mean (which for a data set is denoted as ¯). The arithmetic mean can be similarly defined for vectors in multiple dimensions, not only scalar values; this is often referred to as a centroid.