Chapter 1

Information Representation

Every piece of data your model will ever see — images, text, sensor readings, user clicks — must live inside a computer as numbers. This chapter explains why that's true, why it's harder than it sounds, and how to make smart choices when converting the messy real world into numeric representations.

• 1. Why Computers Speak in Numbers→
• 2. Why Converting Ideas Into Numbers Is Hard→
• 3. Tabular Data→
• 4. Time Series→
• 5. Sensor Data→
• 6. Images and Video→
• 7. Text→
• 8. User Behavior and Combined Data Types→
• 9. Representation Is Compression→