data point
What It Means
A data point is a single piece of information collected or recorded about something - like one customer's age, one sales transaction, or one sensor reading. Think of it as the smallest building block of your data - each individual fact or measurement that gets stored in your systems. When you combine millions of these data points, they form the datasets that power your AI models and business analytics.
Why Chief AI Officers Care
Data points are the raw fuel that determines AI model quality and business insights - poor or biased individual data points create unreliable AI systems that make bad decisions. CAIOs must ensure data points are accurate, representative, and ethically collected because AI models amplify the quality issues present in individual data points across millions of business decisions. The granularity and completeness of data points directly impacts what AI use cases are possible and how well they perform.
Real-World Example
In a retail recommendation system, each data point might be 'Customer ID 12345 purchased Product ABC123 on March 15th for $29.99' - this single transaction record combines with millions of other purchase data points to train AI models that suggest products to customers. If individual data points are missing key information like timestamps or contain errors like negative prices, the entire recommendation engine becomes unreliable.
Common Confusion
People often confuse a data point with an entire dataset or database record, when actually a single database record typically contains multiple data points. For instance, one customer record contains separate data points for name, age, location, and purchase history - each individual field is its own data point.
Industry-Specific Applications
See how this term applies to healthcare, finance, manufacturing, government, tech, and insurance.
Healthcare: In healthcare, a data point represents individual patient measurements, observations, or attributes such as blood pressu...
Finance: In finance, a data point represents individual financial measurements like a single stock price, transaction amount, cre...
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Includes:
- 6 industry-specific applications
- Relevant regulations by sector
- Real compliance scenarios
- Implementation guidance
Technical Definitions
NISTNational Institute of Standards and Technology
"a discrete unit of information."Source: TechTarget_data_point
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