Java for Data Science

Chapter 3. Data Cleaning

Real-world data is frequently dirty and unstructured, and must be reworked before it is usable. Data may contain errors, have duplicate entries, exist in the wrong format, or be inconsistent. The process of addressing these types of issues is called data cleaning. Data cleaning is also referred to as data wrangling, massaging, reshaping , or munging. Data merging, where data from multiple sources is combined, is often considered to be a data cleaning activity.

We need to clean data because any analysis based on inaccurate data can produce misleading results. We want to ensure that the data we work with is quality data. Data quality involves:

• Validity: Ensuring that the data possesses the correct form or structure
• Accuracy: ...