Chapter 2. Data Munging
We are just getting into action! In this new chapter, you'll essentially learn how to munge data. What does munging data imply?
The term munge is a technical term coined about half a century ago by the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Munging means to change, in a series of well-specified and reversible steps, a piece of original data to a completely different (and hopefully a more useful) one. Deep-rooted in hacker culture, munging is often heard in data science processes in parallel with other almost completely synonymous terms, such as data wrangling and data preparation.
Given such premises, in this chapter, the following topics will be covered:
The data science process (so you'll know what is going on and what's next)
Uploading data from a file
Selecting the data you need
Cleaning up missing or wrong data
Adding, inserting, and deleting data
Grouping and transforming data to obtain new, meaningful information
Managing to obtain a dataset matrix...
