How to... deal with Boolean data
My favourite data joke is "What's a ghost's favourite data type? BOO-lean". Now that's out the way, let's talk about potentially the simplest data type but actually one that sits at the heart of a lot of what we do in data analytics and therefore is an important part of data preparation - Boolean data. What does Boolean data mean? Boolean comes from the mathematician George Boole. He was Cork University's first mathematics professor who's theorems eventually became applied to computing. Boolean data is simply a 'True' or 'False' response to a conditional statement or test. Why is it so useful in Data Analysis? Simply, because the response of True or False is often encoded as 1 or 0 behind the scenes in the software we use, the performance of calculations that use Boolean data is very quick. Computing is based on 1s and 0s so Boolean data is easily processed by a computer. A simple column of 1 or 0 responses is actually a...