Chapter 14: Data Transformation and Massaging

Congratulations, you've made your way to the last chapter of the third part of the book – The Preprocessing. In this part of the book, we have so far covered data cleaning, data integration, and data reduction. In this chapter, we will add the last piece to the arsenal of our data preprocessing tools – data transformation and massaging.

Data transformation normally is the last data preprocessing that is applied to our datasets. The dataset may need to be transformed to be ready for a prescribed analysis, or a specific transformation might help a certain analytics tool to perform better, or simply without a correct data transformation, the results of our analysis might be misleading.

In this chapter, we will cover when and where we need data transformation. Furthermore, we will cover the many techniques that are needed for every data preprocessing situation. In this chapter, we're going to cover the following...