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The Physics Behind Data
How physics principles give us deeper insights into our data
As a physicist turned data scientist, my colleagues and coworkers often ask me how my physics background is relevant.
Sure, from the mundane work, there isn’t much in common beyond some overlap with mathematics and statistical techniques. However, philosophically, there is a profound connection:
Every data point corresponds to a real physical event that happened in the real world.
So in a sense, data can always be traced to physical phenomena.
This perspective, unfortunately, is rarely discussed in standard statistics or machine learning discourse. As a result, I believe a foundational understanding is lost in many of my fellow data practitioners. In this article, I’ll describe in more detail how this physics-centric understanding can help us gain more insight into our data.
Everything is Time-Series
Where do data come from? They are derived from events in our Universe. Every event that happened, has happened at…
