Data Formatting

In this section, we will format a given dataset. The main motivations behind formatting data properly are as follows:

• It helps all the downstream systems have a single and pre-agreed form of data for each data point, thus avoiding surprises and, in effect, there is no risk which might break the system.
• To produce a human-readable report from lower-level data that is, most of the time, created for machine consumption.
• To find errors in data.

There are a few ways to perform data formatting in Python. We will begin with the modulus % operator.

The % operator

Python gives us the modulus % operator to apply basic formatting on data. To demonstrate this, we will load the data by reading the combined_data.csv file, and then we will apply some basic formatting to it.

Note

The combined_data.csv file contains some sample medical data for four individuals. The file can be found here: https://packt.live/310179U.

We can load the data from the...