2 WHAT ARE DATA, AND WHAT IS A DATA SET?

As its name suggests, data science is fundamentally dependent on data. In its most basic form, a datum or a piece of information is an abstraction of a real-world entity (person, object, or event). The terms variable, feature, and attribute are often used interchangeably to denote an individual abstraction. Each entity is typically described by a number of attributes. For example, a book might have the following attributes: author, title, topic, genre, publisher, price, date published, word count, number of chapters, number of pages, edition, ISBN, and so on.