Attribute Creation

What exactly do I mean by “data manipulation?” I’m not talking about altering the original data. I’m talking about a transformation of the original data into something new and more meaningful. Specifically, it means using one or more fields and one or more rows of data to create a new aggregated attribute of some kind.

There are lots of different types of attributes. They can be quantitative, such as counting how many times something has happened. An example would be the number of absences in the last 6 months. Attributes can also be qualitative. For instance, sentiment analysis could produce a measure indicating whether a person was happy or not.

Predictive analytics can also be thought of as data manipulation. Dictionary.com says that a predictor is “a formula for determining additional values or derivatives of a function from the relationship of its given values.”10 In other words, predictive analytics are simply...