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Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Data Collection and Cleaning

Data wrangling

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

nounCommon term

In data science & analytics, data wrangling means: The work of turning messy raw data into a clean, well-structured form for analysis, including reshaping, merging, filtering and fixing formats.

In Turkish: veri düzenleme, veri hazırlama

How it is used

An informal but widely used term, close in meaning to 'data munging' and 'data preparation'. It is broader than data cleaning, because it also covers reshaping and combining. Tools such as pandas, dplyr and SQL are used for it.

Example sentences

  1. The modelling took a day; the data wrangling took two weeks.

  2. Most of the data wrangling happens in SQL before anything reaches Python.

Common collocations

  • data wrangling skills
  • do the data wrangling
  • data wrangling script
  • wrangle the data
  • data cleaningThe process of finding and fixing problems in data, such as wrong formats, typos, duplicates and missing values, so that it can be trusted for analysis.
  • raw dataData in the form in which it was first collected or exported, before anyone has cleaned, combined or summarised it.
  • aggregateTo combine many rows of data into summary values, such as totals, counts or averages, usually grouped by a category such as day, product or region.
  • joinAn operation that combines rows from two or more tables using a shared column, such as a customer ID; as a verb, to combine tables in this way.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Data Collection and Cleaning

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