Data cleaning

How it is used

A daily task for analysts and data scientists, often said to take most of a project's time. You do, automate or document data cleaning; the verb form is 'clean the data', and 'clean up the data' is more informal.

Example sentences

1. Most of last week went on data cleaning; the date column had three different formats.

2. Let's automate the data cleaning steps so we don't repeat them every month.

Common collocations

• do data cleaning
• data cleaning step
• data cleaning script
• clean up the data

Related terms

• missing valuesEmpty cells or fields in a dataset where no value was recorded, often shown as NULL, NaN or a blank, which need to be handled before analysis.
• duplicateA record that appears more than once in a dataset, for example the same customer or order stored twice, which can make counts and totals too high.
• data qualityHow accurate, complete, consistent and up to date data is, and therefore how far it can be trusted when people make decisions.
• raw dataData in the form in which it was first collected or exported, before anyone has cleaned, combined or summarised it.

This word in other fields

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

• data cleaning · Data Science & Analytics

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• dataset
• training data
• label
• train
• supervised learning
• neural network
• deep learning
• loss function
• overfitting