Data processing is the act of collecting, cleaning, transforming, and organizing data into meaningful information for analysis, decision-making, and other uses. It involves various techniques, tools, and technologies to manipulate and manage data, such as data mining, data warehousing, data integration, data validation, data analysis, and data visualization.
The data processing process begins with data collection, where raw data is gathered from various sources such as sensors, surveys, social media, or databases. The next step is data cleaning, where data is checked for accuracy, completeness, consistency, and duplicates, and corrected or removed as necessary. The third step is data transformation, where data is converted into a format suitable for analysis and decision-making, such as normalization, aggregation, or summarization.