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Data Munging: The Process to Clean and Prepare Data

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Data Munging: The Process to Clean and Prepare Data Data Munging
Table of Contents

Introduction

Data munging process basically helps make changes to data sets in order to create meaningful results out of them. Businesses nowadays are relying more and more on data. It’s very exciting that we have access to more data than ever before. Whether it is sales data, financial information, or any other type of raw numbers, organizations require ways to turn them into actionable insights. 

With more and better quality data, it will be much easier for us to build models, gain insights, and take action. However, extracting value from all data is not easy at all due to its diversity. In order to get these insights, though, it’s not enough to just work with the data as it is. Organizations have to transform it first.

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What is data munging?

In data analysis, data munging or data wrangling refers to the process of cleaning and transforming raw data into its desired format, usually to facilitate further analysis or visualization. Data munging can be done in Python or R, but it can also be performed with a spreadsheet program.

When you take input and alter it into a format that a software or application can understand, That is data munging. It helps clean up messy data sets. For example, Let’s say the data is in JSON format and you want it to run through a Python program well, you will need to do some munging first.

Data munging is essential for determining the overall quality of data. It is one of the three sexy data geek skills and, It is listed as a painful process of cleaning, parsing, and proofing data before it’s ready to be analysed. It is especially painful when dealing with large data sets. This process often involves a lot of time-consuming trial-and-error.

What is the Purpose of Data munging?

Data Munging: The Process to Clean and Prepare Data Data Munging

The primary purpose of data munging is to take raw data and prepare it for use in an analysis. It helps to prepare data sets so that it can be leveraged by reporting tools or machine learning algorithms. It is quite a tedious task for both computers and humans.

It is a pre-processing step in the data-mining process. On other hand, if done correctly, this can create a solid foundation for future data processing.

Data munging process

Data Munging: The Process to Clean and Prepare Data Data Munging

Before you can use the data collected, you have to make sure it’s in the right format to support the analysis. Data munging is typically done when analyzing large sets of data and can be time-consuming. It includes tasks like removing missing values from the dataset, merging multiple datasets into one table and converting incompatible data types into ones that are compatible with each other. 

The process of data munging can be broken down into three steps: pre-processing, enriching and validation.

  • Data Pre-processing 

Data pre-processing includes data discovery and data transformation. For data munging, data needs to be discovered or located first. Once the data is collected and located, it needs to be cleaned up. The data cleaning includes getting rid of incomplete or inaccurate data, removing unnecessary information, unifying inconsistent formats, detecting and repairing corruptions, filling in missing values etc. Once the data is cleaned it is transformed into new forms that are compatible with downstream processing.

  • Data Enriching 

In the data enrichment process the cleaned and transformed data is turned into meaningful and accurate information. The type of data you extract from the current dataset has a big impact on enrichment. This also entails locating outside sources of information in order to broaden the scope of existing data.

  • Data Validation 

Data validation is the last stage in the data munging process. It’s important to look for inconsistencies and errors that occurred during the transformation process, as well as any data corruption caused by a computer malfunction or error. In addition, ensure that all fields are filled in with valid values. The data is now set to use.

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Benefits of Data Munging

Data munging will help to prepare and manipulate data before data scientists go through rigorous analysis. There are many benefits of data munging such as 

  • It increases efficiency, 
  • Final results are more accurate.
  • Access to quality data.
  • This leads to data driven decisions.

Future of Data munging

Data Munging: The Process to Clean and Prepare Data Data Munging

In today’s data driven world, It’s becoming extremely important to make sense of the data we generate daily. Many analytics programs depend on clean data sets to function correctly. As such, many companies rely on data munging professionals who clean up messy datasets. 

With the enormous volume of data, data munging has become a crucial part of data analytics. After all, what is the use of data if it cannot be properly interpreted? One must use ingenuity to munge data into appropriate formats and then extract what information is needed to complete the task. 

Fortunately, today there are excellent software programs available that make tasks like these much easier than ever before. Switching to an automated data munging method can help free up time of data scientists by removing many of the time-consuming data preparation processes, allowing them to focus on what actually matters.

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