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Concept
Binary data
Résumé
Binary data is data whose unit can take on only two possible states. These are often labelled as 0 and 1 in accordance with the binary numeral system and Boolean algebra.
Binary data occurs in many different technical and scientific fields, where it can be called by different names including bit (binary digit) in computer science, truth value in mathematical logic and related domains and binary variable in statistics.
A discrete variable that can take only one state contains zero information, and is the next natural number after 1. That is why the bit, a variable with only two possible values, is a standard primary unit of information.
A collection of n bits may have 2n states: see binary number for details. Number of states of a collection of discrete variables depends exponentially on the number of variables, and only as a power law on number of states of each variable. Ten bits have more () states than three decimal digits (). 10k bits are more than sufficient to represent an information (a number or anything else) that requires 3k decimal digits, so information contained in discrete variables with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10... states can be ever superseded by allocating two, three, or four times more bits. So, the use of any other small number than 2 does not provide an advantage.
Moreover, Boolean algebra provides a convenient mathematical structure for collection of bits, with a semantic of a collection of propositional variables. Boolean algebra operations are known as "bitwise operations" in computer science. Boolean functions are also well-studied theoretically and easily implementable, either with computer programs or by so-named logic gates in digital electronics. This contributes to the use of bits to represent different data, even those originally not binary.
In statistics, binary data is a statistical data type consisting of categorical data that can take exactly two possible values, such as "A" and "B", or "heads" and "tails". It is also called dichotomous data, and an older term is quantal data.
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