The levels, tools, and purposes of data cleaning – a roadmap to chapters 9, 10, and 11

One of the most exciting moments in any data analytics project is when you have one dataset that you believe contains all the data you need to effectively meet the goals of the project. This moment comes normally in one of the following situations:

• You are done collecting data for the analysis you have in mind.
• You have done extensive data integration from different data sources. Data integration is a very important skillset and we will cover it in Chapter 12, Data Fusion and Data Integration.
• The dataset is just shared with you and it contains everything that you need.

Regardless of how you got your hands on the dataset, this is an exciting moment. But beware that more often than not, you still have many steps to take before you can analyze the data. First, you need to clean the dataset.

To learn about and perform data cleaning, we need to fully understand the following...