What is data munging?

Munging comes from the term "munge," which was coined by some students of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. It is considered one of the most essential parts of the data science process; it involves collecting, aggregating, cleaning, and organizing the data to be consumed by the algorithms designed to make discoveries or to create models. This involves numerous steps, including extracting data from the data source and then parsing or transforming the data into a predefined data structure. Data munging is also referred to as data wrangling.

The data munging process

So what's the data munging process? As mentioned, data can be in any format and the data science process may require data from multiple sources. This data aggregation phase includes scraping it from websites, downloading thousands of .txt or .log files, or gathering the data from RDBMS or NoSQL data stores.

It is very rare to find data in a format that can be used directly by the data...