Data Cleaning and Preparation

Dr. Harish Kumar K S

Assistant Professor
Presidency University
Outline for class
• Lecture – Data Cleaning
• Perspectives on “Dirty Data”
• Perspectives on Data Quality
• Some problems and solutions
• Exercise – Data Surveying and Cleaning with Open
• Review of exercise
• Overview of Assignments and Final Project
• Instant Office Hours with Dan regarding HW1
Data Science – One Definition
DB-hard Queries
Company_Name Address Market Cap
Google Googleplex, Mtn. View, CA $210Bn
Intl. Business Machines Armonk, NY $200Bn
Microsoft Redmond, WA $250Bn

SELECT Market_Cap
From Companies
Where Company_Name = “Apple”

Number of Rows: 0

Problem:
Missing Data

4
DB-hard Queries
Company_Name Address Market Cap
Google Googleplex, Mtn. View, CA $210Bn
Intl. Business Machines Armonk, NY $200Bn
Microsoft Redmond, WA $250Bn

SELECT Market_Cap
From Companies
Where Company Name = “IBM”

Number of Rows: 0

Problem:
Entity Resolution

5
DB-hard Queries
Company_Name Address Market Cap
Google Googleplex, Mtn. View $210
Intl. Business Machines Armonk, NY $200
Microsoft Redmond, WA $250
Sally’s Lemonade Stand Alameda,CA $260

SELECT MAX(Market_Cap)
From Companies

Number of Rows: 1

Problem:
Unit Mismatch

6
Who’s Calling Who’S Data Dirty?

7
Dirty Data
• The Statistics View:
• There is a process that produces data
• Any dataset is a sample of the output of that process
• Results are probabilistic
• You can correct bias in your sample
Dirty Data
• The Database View:
• I got my hands on this data set
• Some of the values are missing, corrupted, wrong, duplicated
• Results are absolute (relational model)
• You get a better answer by improving the quality of the values
in your dataset
Dirty Data
• The Domain Expert’s View:
• This Data Doesn’t look right
• This Answer Doesn’t look right
• What happened?
Dirty Data
• The Data Scientist’s View:
• Some Combination of all of the above
Data Quality Problems
• Data is dirty on its own

• Data sets are clean but integration (i.e., combining

them) screws them up

• Data sets are clean but suffer “bit rot”

• Old data loses its value over time

• Any combination of the above

Big Picture: Where can Dirty Data
Arise?

Integrate
Clean

Extract
Transform
Load

13
Example Data Quality Problems
T.Das|97336o8327|24.95|Y|-|0.0|1000
Ted J.|973-360-8779|2000|N|M|NY|1000

• Can we interpret the data?

• What do the fields mean?
• What is the key? The measures?
• Data glitches
• Typos, multiple formats, missing / default values
• Metadata and domain expertise
• Field three is Revenue. In dollars or cents?
• Field seven is Usage. Is it censored?
• Field 4 is a censored flag. How to handle censored data?
Data Glitches (a telco view)
• Systemic changes to data which are external to
the recorded process.
• Changes in data layout / data types
• Integer becomes string, fields swap positions, etc.
• Changes in scale / format
• Dollars vs. euros
• Temporary reversion to defaults
• Failure of a processing step
• Missing and default values
• Application programs do not handle NULL values well …
• Gaps in time series
• Especially when records represent incremental changes.
 Dirty Data Problems
• From Stanford Data Integration Course:
1) parsing text into fields (separator issues)
2) Naming conventions: ER: NYC vs New York
3) Missing required field (e.g. key field)
4) Different representations (2 vs Two)
5) Fields too long (get truncated)
6) Primary key violation (from un to structured or
during integration
7) Redundant Records (exact match or other)
8) Formatting issues – esp. dates
9) Licensing issues/Privacy/ keep you from using the
data as you would like?
Typical problems
• Why are so many of our customers in Beverly Hills, CA
and Schenectady, NY?
Numeric Outliers
Schema and Data Integration

Which problems does

Integration exacerbate? Mediated Schema

Which problems does Semantic mappings

schema on write help?

wrapperwrapperwrapperwrapperwrapper

Courtesy of Alon Halevy

Data Cleaning Makes Everything Okay?
The appearance of a hole
in the earth's ozone layer
over Antarctica, first
detected in 1976, was so
unexpected that scientists
didn't pay attention to what
their instruments were
telling them; they thought
their instruments were
malfunctioning. In fact, the data
National Center for were rejected
Atmospheric Research
as unreasonable
by data quality
control
algorithms
 How Clean is “clean-enough”?
• How much cleaning is too much?
• Answers are likely to be:
• domain-specific
• data source-specific
• application-specific
• user-specific
• all of the above?
How to split between shared and
application-specific cleaning?
 • from
http://www-new.insightsquared.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/insightsquare
d_dq_infographic-2.png

Data Quality

22
Meaning of Data Quality (1)
• Generally, you have a problem if the data doesn’t
mean what you think it does, or should
• Data not up to spec : garbage in, glitches, etc.
• You don’t understand the spec : complexity, lack of
metadata.
• Many sources and manifestations
• As we have discussed
• Data quality problems are expensive and
pervasive
• DQ problems cost hundreds of billion $$$ each year.
• Resolving data quality problems is often the biggest
effort in a data mining study.
Conventional Definition of Data Quality
• Accuracy
• The data was recorded correctly.
• Completeness
• All relevant data was recorded.
• Uniqueness
• Entities are recorded once.
• Timeliness
• The data is kept up to date.
• Special problems in federated data: time consistency.
• Consistency
• The data agrees with itself.
Problems …
• Unmeasurable
• Accuracy and completeness are extremely difficult,
perhaps impossible to measure.
• Context independent
• No accounting for what is important. E.g., if you are
computing aggregates, you can tolerate a lot of
inaccuracy.
• Incomplete
• What about interpretability, accessibility, metadata,
analysis, etc.
• Vague
• The conventional definitions provide no guidance
towards practical improvements of the data.
Finding a modern definition
• We need a definition of data quality which
• Reflects the use of the data
• Leads to improvements in processes
• Is measurable (we can define metrics)

• First, we need a better understanding of how and

where data quality problems occur
• The data quality continuum
Meaning of Data Quality (2)
• There are many types of data, which have
different uses and typical quality problems
• Federated data
• High dimensional data
• Descriptive data
• Longitudinal data
• Streaming data
• Web (scraped) data
• Numeric vs. categorical vs. text data
Meaning of Data Quality (2)
• There are many uses of data
• Operations
• Aggregate analysis
• Customer relations …
• Data Interpretation : the data is useless if we
don’t know all of the rules behind the data.
• Data Suitability : Can you get the answer from
the available data
• Use of proxy data
• Relevant data is missing
The Data Quality Continuum
• Data and information is not static, it flows in a
data collection and usage process
• Data gathering
• Data delivery
• Data storage
• Data integration
• Data retrieval
• Data mining/analysis
Data Gathering
• How does the data enter the system?
• Sources of problems:
• Manual entry
• No uniform standards for content and formats
• Parallel data entry (duplicates)
• Approximations, surrogates – SW/HW constraints
• Measurement errors.
Solutions
• Potential Solutions:
• Preemptive:
• Process architecture (build in integrity checks)
• Process management (reward accurate data entry, data sharing, data
stewards)
• Retrospective:
• Cleaning focus (duplicate removal, merge/purge, name & address
matching, field value standardization)
• Diagnostic focus (automated detection of glitches).
Internet of Things has Special Problems
• RFID data has many dropped readings
• Typically, use a smoothing filter to interpolate

SELECT distinct tag_id

FROM RFID_stream [RANGE ‘5 sec’]
GROUP BY tag_id

Smoothed
output

Smoothing Filter
Raw
readings

Time
Physical Data Cleaning

“Restock every time inventory goes below 5”

Tracking Superman @ home?
Ubisense tracking data from Ryan Appierspach

He walks Too much

through walls; cleaning
and you
He flies across
lose detail.
the room…
Adding Quality Assessment
Data Delivery
• Destroying or mutilating information by inappropriate
pre-processing
• Inappropriate aggregation
• Nulls converted to default values
• Loss of data:
• Buffer overflows
• Transmission problems
• No checks
Solutions
• Build reliable transmission protocols
• Use a relay server
• Verification
• Checksums, verification parser
• Do the uploaded files fit an expected pattern?
• Relationships
• Are there dependencies between data streams and
processing steps
• Interface agreements
• Data quality commitment from the data stream
supplier.
Data Storage
• You get a data set. What do you do with it?
• Problems in physical storage
• Can be an issue, but terabytes are cheap.
• Problems in logical storage
• Poor metadata.
• Data feeds are often derived from application programs or
legacy data sources. What does it mean?
• Inappropriate data models.
• Missing timestamps, incorrect normalization, etc.
• Ad-hoc modifications.
• Structure the data to fit the GUI.
• Hardware / software constraints.
• Data transmission via Excel spreadsheets, Y2K
 Solutions
• Metadata
• Document and publish data specifications.
• Planning
• Assume that everything bad will happen.
• Can be very difficult.
• Data exploration
• Use data browsing and data mining tools to examine
the data.
• Does it meet the specifications you assumed?
• Has something changed?
Data Integration
• Combine data sets (acquisitions, across departments).
• Common source of problems
• Heterogenous data : no common key, different field formats
• Approximate matching
• Different definitions
• What is a customer: an account, an individual, a family, …
• Time synchronization
• Does the data relate to the same time periods? Are the time
windows compatible?
• Legacy data
• IMS, spreadsheets, ad-hoc structures
• Sociological factors
• Reluctance to share – loss of power.
Solutions
• Commercial Tools
• Significant body of research in data integration
• Many tools for address matching, schema mapping are
available.
• Data browsing and exploration
• Many hidden problems and meanings : must extract
metadata.
• View before and after results : did the integration go
the way you thought?
Data Retrieval
• Exported data sets are often a view of the actual
data. Problems occur because:
• Source data not properly understood.
• Need for derived data not understood.
• Just plain mistakes.
• Inner join vs. outer join
• Understanding NULL values
• Computational constraints
• E.g., too expensive to give a full history, we’ll supply a
snapshot.
• Incompatibility
• Ebcdic? Unicode?
Data Mining and Analysis
• What are you doing with all this data anyway?
• Problems in the analysis.
• Scale and performance
• Confidence bounds?
• Black boxes and dart boards
• Attachment to models
• Insufficient domain expertise
• Casual empiricism
Solutions
• Data exploration
• Determine which models and techniques are
appropriate, find data bugs, develop domain expertise.
• Continuous analysis
• Are the results stable? How do they change?
• Accountability
• Make the analysis part of the feedback loop.
Data Quality Constraints
• Many data quality problems can be captured by
static constraints based on the schema.
• Nulls not allowed, field domains, foreign key
constraints, etc.
• Many others are due to problems in workflow,
and can be captured by dynamic constraints
• E.g., orders above $200 are processed by Biller 2
• The constraints follow an 80-20 rule
• A few constraints capture most cases, thousands of
constraints to capture the last few cases.
• Constraints are measurable. Data Quality
Metrics?
Data Quality Metrics
• We want a measurable quantity
• Indicates what is wrong and how to improve
• Realize that DQ is a messy problem, no set of
numbers will be perfect
• Types of metrics
• Static vs. dynamic constraints
• Operational vs. diagnostic
• Metrics should be directionally correct with an
improvement in use of the data.
• A very large number metrics are possible
• Choose the most important ones.
Examples of Data Quality Metrics
• Conformance to schema
• Evaluate constraints on a snapshot.
• Conformance to business rules
• Evaluate constraints on changes in the database.
• Accuracy
• Perform inventory (expensive), or use proxy (track
complaints). Audit samples?
• Accessibility
• Interpretability
• Glitches in analysis
• Successful completion of end-to-end process
Technical Approaches
• We need a multi-disciplinary approach to attack
data quality problems
• No one approach solves all problem
• Process management
• Ensure proper procedures
• Statistics
• Focus on analysis: find and repair anomalies in data.
• Database
• Focus on relationships: ensure consistency.
• Metadata / domain expertise
• What does it mean? Interpretation
Next Time
• Data Cleaning and Integration Techniques

• But now – hands on Data Cleaning with Open Refine

(a.k.a. Google Refine)