Data wrangling

Data wrangling is the process of cleaning, structuring, and transforming raw data into a usable
format for analysis. Also known as data munging, it involves tasks such as handling missing or
inconsistent data, formatting data types, and merging different datasets to prepare the data
for further exploration and modeling in data analysis or machine learning projects.

Data wrangling is also known as data munging, scrubbing, or remediation.

1. Discover: Data discovery is the initial phase of data wrangling, focused on understanding and
exploring your data. Here are the key aspects:
a. Identifying Data Sources:
Internal: Data from within your organization (databases, CRM, etc.).
External: Public datasets, third-party providers, APIs.
Relevance: Determine if the data aligns with your analysis goals.
b. Understanding the Data:
Structure: Examine the format, data types, and organization of the data (e.g., tables, CSV
files, JSON).
Content: Identify the variables, their meanings, and the range of values they hold.
Quality: Assess data completeness, accuracy, consistency, and potential biases.
c. Exploring Data Characteristics:

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 Descriptive Statistics: Calculate measures like mean, median, standard deviation to
understand data distribution.
Visualizations: Create charts and graphs to identify patterns, trends, and outliers.
Profiling: Use tools to automatically analyze data and generate reports on data quality
and characteristics. (analyzing data to assess its quality and structure. It involves
gathering statistics and summaries about data from various sources).
d. Defining Objectives:
Business Questions: What insights are you seeking from the data?
Analysis Goals: How will the data be used to answer those questions?
e. Potential Challenges:
 Data Quality Issues: Missing values, inconsistencies, errors.
 Data Integration: Combining data from different sources.
 Data Volume: Handling large datasets efficiently.
Importance of Data Discovery:
 Foundation for Wrangling: Provides a clear understanding of the data before cleaning,
transforming, and enriching it.
 Informed Decisions: Helps make decisions about data cleaning strategies and analysis
techniques.
 Efficient Wrangling: Saves time and effort by focusing on relevant data and potential
issues.

2. Structure: Data structure is a critical aspect of data wrangling, as it determines how efficiently
and effectively you can clean, transform, and analyze your data. It is mainly associated with
reshaping data, handling missing values, converting data types organizing and formating data. This
ensures that the data is presented in a coherent and standardized manner, laying the groundwork for
further manipulation and exploration. Here are some key aspects of data structure in data wrangling:
a) Data Types:
 Understanding Data Types: It's essential to recognize and understand the different data
types in your dataset (e.g., numerical, categorical, text, dates). This knowledge informs how
you can clean and transform the data. For example, you might perform mathematical
operations on numerical data, group categorical data, or extract information from text data.
 Converting Data Types: Data wrangling often involves converting data from one type to
another. For instance, you might need to change a string representation of a number into an
actual numerical value for calculations.
b) Data Formats:
 Handling Various Formats: Data can come in various formats (e.g., CSV, JSON, XML,
databases). Data wrangling requires you to handle these different formats, which might

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 involve parsing the data to extract meaningful information or converting the data into a
consistent format for analysis.
 Standardizing Formats: Standardizing data formats is crucial for consistency and
compatibility. For example, ensuring dates are in a consistent format (YYYY-MM-DD) or
that text data is encoded uniformly (UTF-8) can prevent errors and simplify analysis.
c) Data Organization:
 Tables and Structures: Data is often organized in tables (rows and columns) or other
structured formats. Understanding these structures is crucial for tasks like filtering, sorting,
and joining data.
 Relationships between Data: In many cases, data is not contained in a single table but is
spread across multiple tables with relationships between them. Data wrangling may involve
understanding and utilizing these relationships to combine and analyze data from different
sources.
d) Data Quality:
 Identifying Data Issues: Data wrangling often begins with an exploration of the data to
identify potential issues, such as missing values, inconsistencies, duplicates, or outliers.
 Addressing Data Issues: The structure of your data can influence how you address these
issues. For example, you might choose to fill missing values based on the distribution of
other values in the same column or remove duplicate rows based on specific criteria.
e) Data Transformation:
 Reshaping Data: Data wrangling often involves reshaping data to make it suitable for
analysis. This might include tasks like re-organizing and summarizing tables, or creating
new variables based on existing ones.
 Data Aggregation: You might need to group data and calculate summary statistics (e.g.,
sums, averages, counts) for different groups. The structure of your data will determine how
easily you can perform these aggregations.
f) Data Storage:
 Efficient Storage: Once data is wrangled, it needs to be stored efficiently for further use.
The choice of data structure can impact storage efficiency and retrieval speed.
 Data Warehouses and Databases: Data wrangling often prepares data for storage in data
warehouses or databases, where it can be used for reporting, analysis, and decision-making.

3. Clean: Data cleansing addresses inconsistencies, errors, and outliers within the dataset.
This involves removing or correcting inaccurate data, handling duplicates, and addressing any
anomalies that could impact the reliability of analyses. By cleaning the data, your focus is on
enhancing data accuracy and reliability for downstream processes. Here are the key aspects of data
cleaning:
a) Identifying Data Issues:

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 Visual Inspection: Often, the first step is to visually inspect your data to get a sense of its
quality. This might involve looking at a sample of rows, examining summary statistics, or
creating visualizations to identify potential problems.
 Data Profiling: Data profiling tools can help you understand the structure, content, and
quality of your data. They can identify things like missing values, unusual data ranges, or
inconsistencies in data types.
 Pattern Recognition: Look for patterns in your data that might indicate errors. For example,
if you see a lot of values that are outside the expected range for a particular variable, it could
suggest a data entry error.
b) Handling Missing Data:
Deletion: You can choose to delete rows or columns that contain missing values. However,
this can lead to loss of information if the missing data is not random.
Imputation: Imputation involves filling in missing values with estimated values. Common
methods include using the mean, median, or mode of the variable, or using more
sophisticated techniques like regression imputation.
Flagging: You can flag missing values by creating a new variable that indicates whether a
value was missing. This allows you to keep track of missing data while still using the rest of
the data for analysis.
c) Correcting Inconsistent Data:
 Data Type Conversion: Ensure that data is stored in the correct data type. For example,
convert strings that represent numbers into actual numerical values.
 Standardization: Standardize data formats and units. For example, ensure that dates are in
a consistent format (YYYY-MM-DD) or that measurements are in the same units (e.g.,
meters or feet).
 String Correction: Correct errors in text data, such as typos, inconsistencies in
capitalization, or extra spaces.
d) Removing Duplicate Data:
 Exact Duplicates: Identify and remove rows that are exactly identical.
 Near Duplicates: Identify and remove rows that are very similar but not exactly identical.
This might involve using fuzzy matching techniques to identify records that are likely to be
duplicates despite minor differences.
e) Handling Outliers:
 Identification: Identify outliers, which are data points that are significantly different from
other values in your dataset. Outliers can be caused by data entry errors, measurement errors,
or genuine extreme values.
 Treatment: Decide how to handle outliers. You might choose to remove them, correct them,
or leave them as they are if they are genuine extreme values that are relevant to your
analysis.
f) Data Validation:

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  Rules and Constraints: Define rules and constraints for your data. For example, you might
specify that certain variables must be within a certain range or that certain combinations of
values are not allowed.
 Automated Checks: Use automated checks to verify that your data meets these rules and
constraints.
 Manual Review: Manually review your data to ensure that it is accurate and consistent.
g) Documentation:
 Keep Records: Keep records of all the data cleaning steps you have taken. This will help
you to reproduce your results and to understand how your data has been transformed.
 Code Comments: If you are using code to clean your data, add comments to your code to
explain what you are doing.

4. Enrich: Enriching your data involves enhancing it with additional information to provide more
context or depth. This can include merging datasets, extracting relevant features, or
incorporating external data sources. The goal is to augment the original dataset, making it more
comprehensive and valuable for analysis. If you do add data, be sure to structure and clean that
new data. By adding relevant information, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of
your data and uncover hidden patterns or relationships.
a) Identifying Opportunities for Enrichment
The first step is to assess your existing data and identify areas where additional information
could be beneficial. Consider what questions you're trying to answer and what kind of data
could help you get there.
b) Sourcing External Data
Once you know what kind of data you need, you'll need to find reliable sources for that
information. This might include:
 Public Datasets: Government agencies, research institutions, and other organizations often
make data publicly available.
 Commercial Data Providers: Companies that specialize in collecting and selling data.
 APIs: Programmatic interfaces allowing access to data from online services.
c) Data Integration
The next step is to integrate the external data with your existing data. This can be a complex
process, as the data may come in different formats and may need to be cleaned and
transformed before it can be combined. It involves:
 Data Cleaning and Transformation: Ensuring consistency in formats, data types, and units
between your data and the external source.
 Matching and Linking: Identifying corresponding records across datasets (e.g., matching
customer IDs or addresses).

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 d) Types of Data Enrichment (Adding Context and Depth )
Enrichment can involve various types of data, depending on your needs:
 Demographics: Age, gender, income, education, location details.
 Geographics: Latitude/longitude, postal codes, regional information, points of interest.
 Financials: Income, credit scores, market data, company financials.
 Behavioral: Purchase history, website activity, social media engagement.
 Contextual Data: Weather patterns, local events, traffic conditions.

Benefits and outcomes of Data Enrichment

Data enrichment can provide a number of benefits, including:
 Improved Accuracy: By adding more context to your data, you can improve the accuracy
of your analysis and models.
 Enhanced Insights: Enriched data can help you uncover hidden patterns and relationships
that you might have missed otherwise.
 Better Decision-Making: With a more complete understanding of your data, you can make
better decisions.
 Personalization: Data enrichment can help you personalize your products and services to
better meet the needs of your customers.

Challenges of Data Enrichment

Data enrichment can also be challenging, as it requires careful planning and execution. Some of the
challenges include:
 Data Quality: It's important to ensure that the external data you're using is accurate and
reliable.
 Data Integration Complexity: Integrating data from different sources can be complex and
time-consuming.
 Data Privacy and security: You need to be mindful of data privacy regulations when
enriching your data and ensure secure data handling practices.

5. Validate: Validation ensures the quality and reliability of your processed data. You’ll check
for inconsistencies, verify integrity, and confirm that the data adheres to predefined standards.
Validation helps in building your confidence in the accuracy of the dataset and ensures that it meets
the requirements for meaningful analysis. Here's a breakdown of its key aspects
a) Defining Validation Rules: This is the foundation of data validation. You need to establish
specific rules and criteria that your data should adhere to. These rules are often based on:
 Data Type Constraints: Ensuring data is of the correct type (e.g., numeric, text, date). For
example, age should be a number, not text.

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 Range Checks: Verifying that values fall within acceptable ranges. For example, a
temperature reading shouldn't be -100 degrees Celsius.
 Format Checks: Confirming data adheres to specific patterns. For example, phone numbers
should follow a consistent format.
 Consistency Checks: Comparing data across different fields or datasets to ensure
consistency. For example, the city and state should match.
 Uniqueness Checks: Verifying that certain values are unique (e.g., customer IDs, email
addresses).
 Business Rules: Rules specific to your domain or business context. For example, a
customer's age must be greater than 18 for certain services.
b) Implementing Validation Checks: Once rules are defined, you need to implement checks
to enforce them. This can be done through:
 Automated Checks: Using software or scripts to automatically check data against the
defined rules. This is ideal for large datasets.
 Manual Review: Manually inspecting data, especially smaller or more complex datasets, to
identify potential issues.
 Data Profiling Tools: These tools can help identify patterns and anomalies that might
indicate data quality issues.
c) Types of Validation Checks:
 Structural Validation: Checks if the data conforms to the expected structure (e.g., correct
file format, proper delimiters).
 Data Type Validation: Verifies that data is of the correct type (e.g., integer, float, string,
date).
 Range Validation: Ensures that numerical values fall within specified ranges.
 Format Validation: Checks if data adheres to predefined patterns (e.g., date formats, email
addresses).
 Consistency Validation: Compares data across different fields or datasets for consistency.
 Uniqueness Validation: Verifies that values are unique within a dataset.
 Referential Integrity: Ensures that relationships between tables or datasets are maintained
(e.g., foreign keys correctly referencing primary keys).
d) Handling Validation Errors:When validation checks fail, you need a strategy for handling
the errors:
 Error Reporting: Clearly identify and report the errors, including the location and type of
error.
 Data Correction: Correct the errors, either manually or automatically.
 Data Rejection: Reject data that cannot be corrected.
 Data Flagging: Flag the erroneous data for further review or correction.
e) Documentation and Monitoring:
 Document Validation Rules: Maintain clear documentation of all validation rules.

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  Monitor Data Quality: Regularly monitor data quality to ensure ongoing compliance with
validation rules.
Importance of Data Validation: Data validation is essential because it:
 Improves Data Quality: Ensures that your data is accurate, consistent, and reliable.
 Reduces Errors: Catches errors early, preventing them from propagating through your
analysis or models.
 Enhances Decision-Making: Leads to more informed and reliable decisions based on
accurate data.
 Improves Model Performance: Machine learning models perform better with clean and
validated data.

6. Publish: Now your curated and validated dataset is prepared for analysis or dissemination to
business users. This involves documenting data lineage and the steps taken during the entire
wrangling process, sharing metadata, and preparing the data for storage or integration into
data science and analytics tools. Publishing facilitates collaboration and allows others to use the
data for their analyses or decision-making processes. (Publishing about making it accessible and
useful for others).
a) Defining Your Audience and Their Needs:
 Who will use this data? Are they analysts, decision-makers, or other teams?
 What are their technical skills? Do they need a simple report or can they work with raw
data files?
 What are their goals? How will they use the data to answer questions or make decisions?
b) Choosing the Right Format and Delivery Method:
 File Formats: Consider CSV, JSON, Excel, or database formats, depending on the
audience's needs and tools.
 Data Visualization: Create dashboards, reports, or interactive visualizations to make the
data easier to understand.
 APIs: For technical users, provide an API so they can access and integrate the data into their
own systems.
 Data Warehouses: Load the data into a data warehouse for long-term storage and easy
access.
c) Ensuring Data Quality and Documentation:
 Accuracy: Double-check that the published data is accurate and consistent with the cleaned
and transformed data.
 Completeness: Ensure all necessary data is included and that any limitations are clearly
documented.
 Metadata: Provide clear descriptions of the data, including definitions of variables, data
sources, and any transformations performed.

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  Data Lineage: Document the steps taken during data wrangling so that users understand
how the data was processed.
d) Implementing Security and Access Control:
 Permissions: Control who can access and modify the data based on their roles and
responsibilities.
 Encryption: Protect sensitive data by encrypting it during storage and transmission.
 Compliance: Adhere to data privacy regulations and ensure that data is used ethically.
e) Making it Easy to Use and Understand:
 User-Friendly Interfaces: Create intuitive dashboards or tools that make it easy for users to
access and explore the data.
 Clear Documentation: Provide clear instructions on how to use the data, including
examples and tutorials.
 Support: Offer support to users who have questions or need help with the data.

Data wrangling is the process of preparing raw data for analysis or machine learning. Feature
engineering is the process of selecting and structuring data to improve a machine learning
model's performance.