Data Preparation Simply Explained

Introduction

Data preparation is the process of transforming raw data into a format that is usable for analysis. The goal of data preparation is to take the data and make it into something actionable so you can do something with it.

For example, say you want to find out how many cars registered in Washington over the past 5 years have blue or black exteriors. You might have a dataset that looks like this:

What is data preparation?

Data preparation is a process that prepares data for analysis. It can be used to clean data, add or remove data, or change the structure of the data. The goal is to make sure that it’s in a format that makes sense for your analytics platform and allows you to run analyses on it quickly and easily.

Data preparation helps you get more out of your analytics tools by ensuring that they have access to high-quality information when they need it most–at the end of an analysis project!

Why should you care about data preparation?

Data preparation is the first step of every data science project, and it’s important to understand why.

  • Why should you care about data preparation?

Data preparation helps you to get your data into a format that can be analyzed and used by your machine learning models. It involves cleaning up the dirty bits of information in your dataset so that it’s easy for computers to work with, but also making sure that all of the relevant information stays intact (and doesn’t get lost). Data scientists often spend 80{6f258d09c8f40db517fd593714b0f1e1849617172a4381e4955c3e4e87edc1af} or more of their time on this step alone!

  • What are some benefits of doing good quality data prep work?

The benefits include:

  • Decreased cost-of-ownership for IT infrastructure (hardware/software) as well as maintenance costs due to fewer bugs being introduced into production systems because less manual intervention is required during development cycles;
  • Improved product quality through increased automation capability within production environments which reduces opportunities for human error while still allowing users some degree control over how decisions are made based upon their own preferences when possible;

How to prepare your data for analysis

To prepare your data for analysis, you must cleanse it. This involves removing any bad or incorrect data from a source. You can also transform the structure of your dataset by changing its format so that it is more easily analyzed by machine learning algorithms.

Standardizing refers to making sure all variables in a dataset have the same scale (e.g., all measurements are expressed as integers between 1-100). Enriching adds additional information about each observation in an existing dataset (e.g., adding location information). Integrating combines multiple datasets into one large dataset containing all relevant information from each individual source file or database table. Finally, analyze means applying statistical modeling techniques such as regression analysis and clustering algorithms on top of prepared datasets in order to make predictions about future events based on past experiences with similar situations/objects/etcetera

Data Preparation is a process that prepares data for analysis.

Data preparation is a process that prepares data for analysis. It’s the first step in the data analytics process, and it’s crucial to ensure that your analysis will be effective and accurate.

Data preparation involves several steps:

  • Cleaning – Removing duplicate records, correcting spelling errors and typos, removing invalid values (e.g., negative dollar amounts), etc.
  • Standardizing – Making sure all columns have consistent formats (e.g., dates should be formatted as MM/DD/YYYY) so you can compare them effectively later on without having to do any additional calculations yourself

Conclusion

Data preparation is a process that prepares data for analysis. It involves cleaning, transforming and enriching data to make it usable for business decisions or scientific research. This article has given you an overview of what data preparation is and why it’s important so that you can understand more about this topic.