noisy data

What is noisy data?

Noisy data is meaningless data. The term has often been used as a synonym for corrupt data. However, its meaning has expanded to include any data that cannot be understood and interpreted correctly by machines, such as unstructured data. Any data that has been received, stored, or changed in such a manner that it cannot be read or used by the program that originally created it can be described as noisy.

Noisy data unnecessarily increases the amount of storage space required and can also adversely affect the results of any data mining analysis. Statistical analysis can use information gleaned from historical data to weed out noisy data and facilitate data mining.

Noisy data can be caused by hardware failures, programming errors, and gibberish input from speech or optical character recognition (OCR) programs. Spelling errors, industry abbreviations and slang can also impede machine reading.