Think about your data intelligently and ask the right questions Key FeaturesMaster data cleaning techniques necessary to perform real-world data science and machine learning tasksSpot common problems with dirty data and develop flexible solutions from first principlesTest and refine your newly acquired skills through detailed exercises at the end of each chapterBook Description Data cleaning is the all-important first step to successful data science, data analysis, and machine learning. If you work with any kind of data, this book is your go-to resource, arming you with the insights and heuristics experienced data scientists had to learn the hard way. In a light-hearted and engaging exploration of different tools, techniques, and datasets real and fictitious, Python veteran David Mertz teaches you the ins and outs of data preparation and the essential questions you should be asking of every piece of data you work with. Using a mixture of Python, R, and common command-line tools, Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science follows the data cleaning pipeline from start to end, focusing on helping you understand the principles underlying each step of the process. You'll look at data ingestion of a vast range of tabular, hierarchical, and other data formats, impute missing values, detect unreliable data and statistical anomalies, and generate synthetic features. The long-form exercises at the end of each chapter let you get hands-on with the skills you've acquired along the way, also providing a valuable resource for academic courses. What you will learnIngest and work with common data formats like JSON, CSV, SQL and NoSQL databases, PDF, and binary serialized data structuresUnderstand how and why we use tools such as pandas, SciPy, scikit-learn, Tidyverse, and BashApply useful rules and heuristics for assessing data quality and detecting bias, like Benford’s law and the 68-95-99.7 ruleIdentify and handle unreliable data and outliers, examining z-score and other statistical propertiesImpute sensible values into missing data and use sampling to fix imbalancesUse dimensionality reduction, quantization, one-hot encoding, and other feature engineering techniques to draw out patterns in your dataWork carefully with time series data, performing de-trending and interpolationWho this book is for This book is designed to benefit software developers, data scientists, aspiring data scientists, teachers, and students who work with data. If you want to improve your rigor in data hygiene or are looking for a refresher, this book is for you. Basic familiarity with statistics, general concepts in machine learning, knowledge of a programming language (Python or R), and some exposure to data science are helpful.

Many researchers jump straight from data collection to data analysis without realizing how analyses and hypothesis tests can go profoundly wrong without clean data. This book provides a clear, step-by-step process of examining and cleaning data in order to decrease error rates and increase both the power and replicability of results. Jason W. Osborne, author of Best Practices in Quantitative Methods (SAGE, 2008) provides easily-implemented suggestions that are research-based and will motivate change in practice by empirically demonstrating, for each topic, the benefits of following best practices and the potential consequences of not following these guidelines. If your goal is to do the best research you can do, draw conclusions that are most likely to be accurate representations of the population(s) you wish to speak about, and report results that are most likely to be replicated by other researchers, then this basic guidebook will be indispensible.

A comprehensive guide to automated statistical data cleaning The production of clean data is a complex and time-consuming process that requires both technical know-how and statistical expertise. Statistical Data Cleaning brings together a wide range of techniques for cleaning textual, numeric or categorical data. This book examines technical data cleaning methods relating to data representation and data structure. A prominent role is given to statistical data validation, data cleaning based on predefined restrictions, and data cleaning strategy. Key features: Focuses on the automation of data cleaning methods, including both theory and applications written in R. Enables the reader to design data cleaning processes for either one-off analytical purposes or for setting up production systems that clean data on a regular basis. Explores statistical techniques for solving issues such as incompleteness, contradictions and outliers, integration of data cleaning components and quality monitoring. Supported by an accompanying website featuring data and R code. This book enables data scientists and statistical analysts working with data to deepen their understanding of data cleaning as well as to upgrade their practical data cleaning skills. It can also be used as material for a course in data cleaning and analyses.

Written for practitioners of data mining, data cleaning and database management. Presents a technical treatment of data quality including process, metrics, tools and algorithms. Focuses on developing an evolving modeling strategy through an iterative data exploration loop and incorporation of domain knowledge. Addresses methods of detecting, quantifying and correcting data quality issues that can have a significant impact on findings and decisions, using commercially available tools as well as new algorithmic approaches. Uses case studies to illustrate applications in real life scenarios. Highlights new approaches and methodologies, such as the DataSphere space partitioning and summary based analysis techniques. Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning will serve as an important reference for serious data analysts who need to analyze large amounts of unfamiliar data, managers of operations databases, and students in undergraduate or graduate level courses dealing with large scale data analys is and data mining.

This is an overview of the end-to-end data cleaning process. Data quality is one of the most important problems in data management, since dirty data often leads to inaccurate data analytics results and incorrect business decisions. Poor data across businesses and the U.S. government are reported to cost trillions of dollars a year. Multiple surveys show that dirty data is the most common barrier faced by data scientists. Not surprisingly, developing effective and efficient data cleaning solutions is challenging and is rife with deep theoretical and engineering problems. This book is about data cleaning, which is used to refer to all kinds of tasks and activities to detect and repair errors in the data. Rather than focus on a particular data cleaning task, this book describes various error detection and repair methods, and attempts to anchor these proposals with multiple taxonomies and views. Specifically, it covers four of the most common and important data cleaning tasks, namely, outlier detection, data transformation, error repair (including imputing missing values), and data deduplication. Furthermore, due to the increasing popularity and applicability of machine learning techniques, it includes a chapter that specifically explores how machine learning techniques are used for data cleaning, and how data cleaning is used to improve machine learning models. This book is intended to serve as a useful reference for researchers and practitioners who are interested in the area of data quality and data cleaning. It can also be used as a textbook for a graduate course. Although we aim at covering state-of-the-art algorithms and techniques, we recognize that data cleaning is still an active field of research and therefore provide future directions of research whenever appropriate.

Discover how to describe your data in detail, identify data issues, and find out how to solve them using commonly used techniques and tips and tricks Key FeaturesGet well-versed with various data cleaning techniques to reveal key insightsManipulate data of different complexities to shape them into the right form as per your business needsClean, monitor, and validate large data volumes to diagnose problems before moving on to data analysisBook Description Getting clean data to reveal insights is essential, as directly jumping into data analysis without proper data cleaning may lead to incorrect results. This book shows you tools and techniques that you can apply to clean and handle data with Python. You'll begin by getting familiar with the shape of data by using practices that can be deployed routinely with most data sources. Then, the book teaches you how to manipulate data to get it into a useful form. You'll also learn how to filter and summarize data to gain insights and better understand what makes sense and what does not, along with discovering how to operate on data to address the issues you've identified. Moving on, you'll perform key tasks, such as handling missing values, validating errors, removing duplicate data, monitoring high volumes of data, and handling outliers and invalid dates. Next, you'll cover recipes on using supervised learning and Naive Bayes analysis to identify unexpected values and classification errors, and generate visualizations for exploratory data analysis (EDA) to visualize unexpected values. Finally, you'll build functions and classes that you can reuse without modification when you have new data. By the end of this Python book, you'll be equipped with all the key skills that you need to clean data and diagnose problems within it. What you will learnFind out how to read and analyze data from a variety of sourcesProduce summaries of the attributes of data frames, columns, and rowsFilter data and select columns of interest that satisfy given criteriaAddress messy data issues, including working with dates and missing valuesImprove your productivity in Python pandas by using method chainingUse visualizations to gain additional insights and identify potential data issuesEnhance your ability to learn what is going on in your dataBuild user-defined functions and classes to automate data cleaningWho this book is for This book is for anyone looking for ways to handle messy, duplicate, and poor data using different Python tools and techniques. The book takes a recipe-based approach to help you to learn how to clean and manage data. Working knowledge of Python programming is all you need to get the most out of the book.

Written in Ron Cody's signature informal, tutorial style, this book develops and demonstrates data cleaning programs and macros that you can use as written or modify which will make your job of data cleaning easier, faster, and more efficient. --