Data reporting is the process of
collecting
The hobby of collecting includes seeking, locating, acquiring, organizing, cataloging, displaying, storing, and maintaining items that are of interest to an individual ''collector''. Collections differ in a wide variety of respects, most obvi ...
and submitting
data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpret ...
which gives rise to accurate analyses of the
facts on the ground
Facts on the ground is a diplomatic and geopolitical term that means the situation in reality as opposed to in the abstract.
The term was popularised in the 1970s in discussions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to refer to Israeli settlement ...
;
inaccurate data reporting can lead to vastly uninformed decision-making based on erroneous evidence. Different from
data analysis
Data analysis is a process of inspecting, cleansing, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of discovering useful information, informing conclusions, and supporting decision-making. Data analysis has multiple facets and approaches, enc ...
that transforms data and information into insights, data reporting is the previous step that translates raw data into information.
When data is not reported, the problem is known as
underreporting; the opposite problem leads to
false positive
A false positive is an error in binary classification in which a test result incorrectly indicates the presence of a condition (such as a disease when the disease is not present), while a false negative is the opposite error, where the test resul ...
s.
Data reporting can be an incredibly difficult endeavor.
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses inc ...
bureaus may hire even hundreds of thousands of workers to achieve the task of counting all of the residents of a country.
Teachers use data from student assessments to determine grades; cellphone manufacturers rely on sales data from retailers to point the way to which models to increase production of. The effective management of nearly any company relies on accurate data.
References
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Descriptive statistics
Data processing