What are data fusion and data integration?

In most cases, data fusion and data integration are terms that are used interchangeably, but there are conceptual and technical distinctions between them. We will get to those shortly. Let's start with what both have in common and what they mean. Whenever the data we need for our analytic goals are from different sources, before we can perform the data analytics, we need to integrate the data sources into one dataset that we need for our analytic goals. The following diagram summarizes this integration visually:

Figure 12.1 – Data integration from different sources

In the real world, data integration is much more difficult than what's shown in the preceding figure. There are many challenges that you need to overcome before integration is possible. These challenges could be due to organizational privacy and security challenges that restrict our data accessibility. But even assuming that these challenges...