November 2012
Beginner to intermediate
264 pages
7h 48m
English
Content preview from Bad Data HandbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Setting the Pace: What Is Bad Data?
We all say we like data, but we don’t.
We like getting insight out of data. That’s not quite the same as liking the data itself.
In fact, I dare say that I don’t quite care for data. It sounds like I’m not alone.
It’s tough to nail down a precise definition of “Bad Data.” Some people consider it a purely hands-on, technical phenomenon: missing values, malformed records, and cranky file formats. Sure, that’s part of the picture, but Bad Data is so much more. It includes data that eats up your time, causes you to stay late at the office, drives you to tear out your hair in frustration. It’s data that you can’t access, data that you had and then lost, data that’s not the same today as it was yesterday…
In short, Bad Data is data that gets in the way. There are so many ways to get there, from cranky storage, to poor representation, to misguided policy. If you stick with this data science bit long enough, you’ll certainly encounter your fair share.
To that end, we decided to compile Bad Data Handbook, a rogues gallery of data troublemakers. We found 19 people from all reaches of the data arena to talk about how data issues have bitten them, and how they’ve healed.
In particular:
- Guidance for Grubby, Hands-on Work
You can’t assume that a new dataset is clean and ready for analysis. Kevin Fink’s Is It Just Me, or Does This Data Smell Funny? (Chapter 2) offers several techniques to take the data for a test drive.
There’s plenty of data trapped in spreadsheets, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.