Data Exploration and

Data Preparation

What Is Data Exploration?

Data Exploration or Exploratory data analysis (EDA) provides a
simple set of exploration tools that bring out the basic understanding of
real-time data into data analytics. The outcomes of data exploration can
be a powerful factor in understanding the structure of data, values
distributions, and interrelationships. Data exploration can also be
helpful for data scientists to gain proper insights into business data that
was not easily seen previously.
Data exploration is the first step in data analytics. Understanding
business data is essential for making a well-planned decision, which
usually involves summarizing the main features of a data set, such as its
size, pattern, characteristics, accuracy, and more.
The entire process is conducted by a team of data analysts using visual
analysis tools and some advanced statistical software like R. Data
exploration can use a combination of manual methods and automated
tools, such as data visualization, charts, and preliminary reports.

What Is Data Preparation?

Data preparation is typically used for proper business data analysis. The
data preparation process involves collecting, cleaning, and consolidating
data into a file that can be further used for analysis.

Why Data Preparation Is Necessary?

 To filter unstructured, inconsistent, and disordered data.
 Connecting data from real-time multiple data sources.
 For quick reporting of data.
 To handle data collected from a scraped file like PDF document.
The Process of Data Preparation

Steps of data preparation

Here, we will discuss the standard data preparation procedure, which

has been followed by every business.

Gather Data
This is an initial process for each business. In this phase, it is necessary
to collect data from various sources — the sources can be of any type
such as from catalogs or ad-hoc can be added.

Discover Data
The next step is discovering the data; here, it is very important to
understand the data and categorize it into different datasets. This step
might take a long time to filter because of the huge collection of
datasets.

Cleaning and Validating Data

This is necessary to remove faulty and critical data that you think may
not be useful in the next step. Important steps need to be taken here:

 Removing unnecessary data and outliers.

 Use the appropriate patterns for refining all the data.
 Use the lock to protect your sensitive data.
 Fill the empty space for data flow.
After cleaning the data, it should go through the test team where all the
refine data has to be rechecked.

Transforming the Data

Transforming the data defines maintaining the format or value entries in
order to meet well define output and can clearly understand the wider
audience.

Storing Data
This is the final step after going through all the above processes. Once
the data is cleaned, it is ready to offer third-party tools, such as business
intelligence tools for analysis.
You may also like: How to do Data Exploration for Image
Segmentation and Object Detection

Benefits of Data Preparation

Here are a few benefits of data preparation:

 Quick response in fixing the error before processing

 Producing data by cleaning and reformatting the datasets
 Higher quality data helps you to analyze data more effectively and
quickly

Data Exploration Methods

There are two formats of data exploration: automatic and manual.
Mostly, analysts preferred automated methods, such as data
visualization tools because of their accuracy and quick response. Manual
data exploration, on the other hand, methods include filtering and
drilling down into data in Excel spreadsheets or writing scripts to
analyze raw data sets.
Stages of data mining

Data exploration plays an essential role in the data mining

process. There are several techniques for analyzing data such as:
Univariate analysis: It is the simplest form of analyzing data. Univariate
means that there is only one variable in your data.
Bivariate analysis: It is the simplest form of quantitative analysis. It
includes the analysis of two variables (as x, y) used for calculating the
empirical relationship between two variables.
Multivariate analysis: Multivariate Analysis can be used to refer to any
analysis that involves more than one variable (e.g. in Multiple Regression
or GLM ANOVA).
Principal components analysis: The analysis and conversion of
possibly correlated variables into a smaller number of uncorrelated
variables.
The next step after data exploration is data discovery. In this phase,
business intelligence tools are used to inspect trends, sequences, and
events and create visualizations to present to business managers.

Data Exploration Tools

Many business intelligence tools and data visualization software are
available. Some commonly used data analysis tools are Microsoft Power
BI, Qlik, and Tableau.
Many business intelligence tools and data visualization software are
available. Some commonly used tools used by data analysts
are Microsoft Power BI, Qlik, and Tableau.

Data Exploration and Preparation Steps

The quality of the output always depends on the quality of the input. So,
make the input value so versatile so that the output remains constant.
Below are the steps to understand, clear, and prepare your data for
building your predictive model:

1. Variable Identification
2. Univariate Analysis
3. Bi-variate Analysis
4. Missing Values Treatment
5. Outlier Treatment
6. Variable Transformation
7. Variable Creation

Let’s start discussing each step in detail.

Variable Identification
In this step, you have to first identify the input and output variables.
Then, identify the data type and category of the variables. Let's focus
more by applying one real-time example
Suppose a school wants to predict the ratio (pass or fail) of student
results. Here, you need to collect predictor variables, target variables,
data types, and category of the variable.
Below, the variables have been defined in a different category:

Understanding attributes of data

Attributes of data

Univariate Analysis
In univariate analysis, variables are explored one-by-one. This method
depends on whether a variable type is categorical or continuous:

 Categorical Variables: This is also called a discrete variable that

has two or more categories (values). It can be measured using two
metrics, Count and Count% against each category. A bar chart can
be used as a visualization.
 Continuous Variables: A continuous variable is a quantitative
variable in which the data is measured in height, weight, or
time. Continuous variables can take on almost any numeric value
and can be meaningfully divided into smaller increments, including
fractions.

Bi-variate Analysis
Bivariate analysis is the analysis of bivariate data. It used to find out if
there is a relationship between two sets of values. It usually involves the
variables X and Y.
Examples of Bi-Variate Analysis:

 Scatter Plots
 Regression Analysis
 Correlation Coefficients
Bivariate scatter example

Missing Values Treatment

It is necessary to understand the concept of missing values because if it
not handled properly, then inaccurate interference occurs. It can lead to
incorrect prediction and classification.

Finding missing values in a dataset

Outlier Treatment
The outlier is a data point that is distant from another different point.
These outliers should remove from datasets. This can be identified
directly by looking at the data table or worksheet.
Cleaning outliers

Variable Transformation
Data does not always come in a form that is immediately suitable for
analysis. We often have to change variables before analysis. A
transformation is a recursion of data using a function or some
mathematical operation on each observation.

Conclusion
It is clear from the above discussion that by using the right tools, an
organization can easily detect and present data effectively. However, as
with anything, having a plan and focus yields the best results.
You can use this detail information on data discovery and data
preparation before you start analyzing data.