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Data Management
===============

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2
   :hidden:

   numeric-tables.rst
   data-sources.rst
   data-dictionaries.rst
   data-serialization-and-deserialization.rst
   data-model.rst


Effective data management is among key constituents of the
performance of a data analytics application. For |full_name|, effective data
management requires effectively performing the following operations:

#. Raw data acquisition, filtering, and normalization with data
   source interfaces.
#. Data conversion to a numeric representation for numeric tables.
#. Data streaming from a numeric table to an algorithm.

|short_name| provides a set of customizable interfaces to operate on
your out-of-memory and in-memory data in different usage scenarios,
which include batch processing, online processing, and distributed
processing, as well as more complex scenarios, such as a combination
of online and distributed processing.

One key concept of Data Management in |short_name| is a data set.
A *data set* is a collection of data of a defined structure that
characterizes an analyzed and modeled object. Specifically, the
object is characterized by a set of attributes (Features), which
form a Feature Vector of dimension p. Multiple feature vectors form
a set of Observations of size n. |short_name| defines a tabular view
of a data set where table rows represent observations and columns
represent features.

.. figure:: ./images/data-set.png
  :width: 400
  :alt: Dataset

An observation corresponds to a particular measurement of an observed
object, and therefore when measurements are done, at distinct moments
in time, the set of observations characterizes how the object evolves
in time.

It is not a rare situation when only a subset of features can be
measured at a given moment. In this case, the non-measured features
in the feature vector become blank, or missing. Special statistical
techniques enable recovery (emulation) of missing values.

You normally start working with |short_name| by selecting an
appropriate data source, which provides an interface for your raw
data set. |short_name| data sources support categorical, ordinal, and
continuous features. It means that data sources can automatically
transform non-numeric categorical and ordinary data into a numeric
representation. When the structure of your raw data is more complex
or when the default transformation mechanism does not fit your needs,
you may customize the data source by implementing a custom derivative
class.

Because a data source is typically associated with out-of-memory
data, such as files, databases, and so on, streaming out-of-memory
data into memory and back is among major functions of a data source.
However you can also use a data source to implement an in-memory
non-numeric data transformation into a numeric form.

A numeric table is a key interface to operate on numeric in-memory
data. |short_name| supports several important cases of a numeric data
layout: homogeneous tables, arrays of structures, and structures of
arrays, as well as Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) encoding for sparse
data.

|short_name| algorithms operate with in-memory numeric data accessed
through Numeric table interfaces.