What is data classification?

Data is growing implausibly fast, particularly unstructured data, which makes it hard for companies to keep up. When it comes to managing data effectively, data classification is necessary. Data classification allows businesses to organize data in the most fertile way possible. By sorting data into topics, sensitive information, importance, and more, you can find your data instantly, and even use it to discover insights.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help you classify data at scale, and no-coding tools, like Kimola Cognitive, make it really easy to get started with text data classification right away.

Read on to find out what data classification is and how your business can use AI tools to automate data classification:

Data classification is the decision of which category of new data encountered by the system falls within the scope of what is learned from the analysis of the training sets previously provided to the system. This definition, which sounds quite technical, actually points to an activity that all people, not just machines, do all the time. Because the effort to classify everything we see around us is a behavior we have had from the past.

This situation is no different today. For example, we categorize a person as "good or bad" in our minds by evaluating our past experiences. In doing so, we evaluate many factors from our previous similar experiences with personality and character.

Just like in this example, we need to classify newly obtained raw data in the light of our previous experience because we need to classify new data in order to make sense of it.

The data type also determines the type of classification. So if this data is a text, our action would be text data classification. (If you want to know more about the definition of Text Classification and Using Text Classification in Qualitative Research, check out our article on “What is Text Classification?”.) Text data classification is of great importance as it is one of the most common types of classification used by researchers today.

🌮 Also read: What Is Text Analysis and Text Analysis Techniques