5 Cleaning data
In the late 1980s, my employer wanted to know how much rain had fallen in various places. Their solution? They gave me a list of cities and phone numbers and asked me to call each in sequence, recording the previous day’s rainfall in an Excel spreadsheet. Nowadays, getting that sort of information—and many other types—is pretty easy. Many governments provide data sets for free, and numerous companies make data available for a price. No matter what topic you’re researching, data is almost certainly available. The only questions are where you can get it, how much it costs, and what format it comes in.
You should ask another question, too: how accurate is the data you’re using? It’s easy to assume that a CSV file from an official-looking ...
Get Pandas Workout now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
