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What Is Data Preparation? + 9 Steps For Effective

Data Prep

Fasih Khan

 March 21st, 2024

A survey by found that 76% of data scientists consider data preparation their least
favorite part of their job. This may be because data preparation can be a complex

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 and time-intensive task, consuming hours, days, and sometimes even weeks of their
valuable time.

However, it is also necessary to make raw data ready for analysis and consumption,
and helps gain valuable insights from your data. So, how can you prepare data
without spending several hours wrangling it? Keep reading to learn more in our
comprehensive guide on data preparation.

What Is Data Preparation?

Data preparation (also known as data prep) is the essential process of refining raw
data to make it suitable for analysis and processing. Raw data, which is filled with
errors, duplicates, and missing values, impacts data quality and, ultimately, data-
driven decision-making.

Data preparation is crucial as it can consume up to 80% of the time in a machine

learning project. Utilizing specialized data preparation tools is imperative to
streamline and optimize this process.

According to surveys by Anaconda and Forbes, data scientists spend 45-60% of their
time collecting, organizing, and preparing data, with data cleansing accounting for
more than a quarter of their day. This takes valuable time away from their core tasks,
such as model selection, training, and deployment. Therefore, many question the
wisdom of asking highly skilled data scientists to do the equivalent of digital janitorial
work.

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 [Data Preparation Challenges via Statista]

Why is Data Preparation Necessary ?

Raw data is messy, incomplete, and inconsistent. Additionally, it is spread across

diverse sources, formats, and types. Data preparation helps businesses by:

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 Extracting Unstructured Data
Data preparation is essential for extracting data from unstructured sources such as
PDFs, .TXT, .CSV, etc. Data preparation involves converting unstructured data into a
format suitable for analysis and unlocking insights from diverse sources.

For example, preparing data can help you extract financial data from PDFs and CSV
files to analyze trends and patterns in revenue, expenses, and profits. By converting
unstructured data into a structured format, data preparation enables comprehensive
data analysis that can reveal hidden insights and opportunities.

Enhancing Data Quality

Data preparation improves data quality by rectifying errors, inconsistencies, missing
values, outliers, and more. It also validates and verifies data to ensure correctness
and completeness. For example, e"ective data quality management can prevent
inaccurate analysis by removing duplicate entries from a customer database.

Amplifying Value
Data preparation adds value to data by incorporating supplementary information like
geolocation, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. It also helps integrate data from
diverse sources to form a cohesive overview. For instance, a data value can reveal
customer satisfaction by adding sentiment analysis scores to feedback comments.

Facilitating Data Analysis

Data preparation makes data analysis easier by transforming data into a consistent
format that is compatible with analysis tools and applications. It also helps discover
patterns, trends, correlations, and other insights. For example, data analysis can
simplify time-series analysis by converting various date formats into a standardized
structure.

Enhancing Data Consumption

Data preparation makes data more consumable by providing metadata and

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 documentation that ensure transparency and usability. It also shares data through
APIs, web services, files, or databases, making it accessible to diverse users and
applications. For instance, data consumption can improve user understanding by
providing data documentation that details the origin and definitions of each field.

Now that you understand the importance of clean, healthy data, let’s dive straight
into how you and your team can prepare data.

9 Key Data Preparation Steps

Step 1: Defining Objectives and Requirements

You must start preparing data by defining your objectives and requirements for the
data analysis project. Ask yourself the following questions:

What is the purpose and scope of the data analysis project?

What are the main questions or hypotheses that you want to test or explore with
the data?
Who are the intended users and consumers of the data analysis results? What are
their roles and responsibilities?
What are the data sources, formats, and types that you need to access and
analyze?
What is the quality, accuracy, completeness, timeliness, and relevance criteria you
must meet for the data?
What are the ethical, legal, and regulatory implications and constraints that you
need to consider?

Answering these questions can help you clarify the goals, scope, and requirements of
your data analysis project, as well as identify the potential challenges, risks, and
opportunities that you may encounter along the way.

Step 2: Collecting Data

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 Next, you must collect data from various sources, such as files, databases, web
pages, social media, and more. Use reliable and trustworthy data sources to provide
high-quality and relevant data for your analysis.

Feel free to leverage appropriate tools and methods to access and acquire data from
di"erent sources, such as web scraping, APIs, databases, files, etc.

Gathering data from multiple sources helps you gain a more comprehensive and
accurate understanding of your business problem. Di"erent sources may provide
di"erent types of data, such as quantitative or qualitative, structured or
unstructured, or primary or secondary.

Moreover, gathering data from multiple sources helps you reduce bias and increase
the reliability and validity of your data. At the same time, gathering data from
multiple sources helps you identify new opportunities and potential threats You can
gain insights into market trends, industry performance, customer behavior, and
competitor strategies.

Step 3: Integrating and Combining Data

Data integration means combining data from di"erent sources or dimensions to
create a holistic view of the data. It helps you merge your data to create a
comprehensive and unified dataset.

Data integration tools can perform operations such as concatenation, union,

intersection, di"erence, join, etc. They can also handle di"erent types of data
schemas or structures.

However, you must consider several key practices while integrating and combining
data. First, you must use a common standard format and structure for storing and
organizing your data. Formats like CSV, JSON, or XML provide consistency and make
data more accessible and understandable.

You must also centralize your data storage and management using options like cloud
storage, a data warehouse, or a data lake. A centralized platform streamlines data
access, ensures data consistency, and simplifies data governance.

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 In addition, you must ensure security and reliability in the data management
process. Employ robust measures like encryption, authentication, authorization,
backup, recovery, and audit mechanisms. Encryption safeguards data in transit and
at rest, while authentication and authorization control access to sensitive
information.

Step 4: Profiling Data

Data profiling is the process of examining a dataset to gain an in-depth
understanding of its characteristics, quality, structure, and content. It helps users
uphold data quality standards within an organizational framework. At its core, data
profiling helps ensure that data columns adhere to standard data types, thus giving
the dataset an added layer of precision.

Ultimately, data profiling helps uncover insights into the uniformity of data or any
discrepancies that might be present, including null values. Initially, you must review
source data, check for errors, inconsistencies, and anomalies, as well as understand
the structure, content, and relationships of files, databases, and web pages.

Moreover, you must review aspects such as:

Completeness.
Accuracy.
Consistency.
Validity.
Timeliness.

Create a comprehensive data profile by summarizing source data details,

incorporating metadata, statistics, definitions, descriptions, and sources, and
documenting formats, types, distributions, frequencies, ranges, outliers, and
anomalies.

Step 5: Exploring Data

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 Data exploration is the process of getting familiar with your data and discovering its
characteristics, patterns, trends, outliers, and anomalies. Data exploration can help
you understand your data better and assess its quality and suitability for your
analysis objectives.

As you explore the data, you must identify and categorize data types, formats, and
structures within your dataset. Next, you must overview descriptive statistics, noting
measures like the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation for each relevant
numerical variable.

Leveraging visualizations such as histograms, boxplots, and scatterplots can give you
insights into data distributions and underlying relationships and patterns. You can
also use more advanced methods such as clustering, dimensionality reduction, and
association rules to unearth hidden trends, identify correlations, highlight outliers,
and reveal anomalies. Likewise, it’s equally important to evaluate how relevant the
data is to what you want to learn.

Step 6: Transforming Data

Data transformation converts data from one format, structure, or value to another,
playing a pivotal role in the data preparation journey by rendering data more
accessible and conducive to analysis.

Data transformation makes source data more compatible with the destination
system and application, making it easier to analyze and consume. There are several
techniques to transform data, such as normalization, aggregation, and filtering—and
how you apply these transformations depends on the use case.

For instance, in a sales dataset, data normalization can help you standardize prices
to a common currency. Simultaneously, payment methods are categorized into
uniform formats, such as changing “CC,” “Visa,” or “MasterCard” to “credit card”.

Step 7: Enriching Data

Data enrichment is the process of refining, improving, and enhancing a dataset by
adding new features or columns. It helps to improve the accuracy and reliability of

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 raw data. Data teams enrich data by adding new and supplemental information and
verifying the information against third-party sources.

Append data by combining multiple data sources, including CRM, financial, and
marketing data, to create a comprehensive dataset that provides a holistic view.
This enrichment technique also involves integrating third-party data, such as
demographics, to enhance insights.

Segment data by grouping entities like customers or products based on shared

attributes, utilizing standard variables such as age and gender to categorize and
describe these entities.
Engineer new features or additional fields by deriving them from existing data. For
instance, you can calculate customer age based on their birthdate.
Address missing values by estimating them from available data. For instance, you
can calculate absent sales figures by referencing historical trends.
Identify entities like names and addresses within unstructured text data,
extracting actionable information from text that lacks a fixed structure.
Assign specific categories to unstructured text data, such as product descriptions,
or categorize customer feedback to enable analysis and gain insights.
Leverage various enrichment techniques to enhance your data with additional
information or context, such as geocoding, sentiment analysis, entity recognition,
topic modeling, etc.
Use cleaning techniques to remove or correct errors or inconsistencies in your
data, such as duplicates, outliers, missing values, typos, formatting issues, etc.
Use validation techniques to verify or confirm the correctness or completeness of
your data, such as checksums, rules, constraints, tests, etc.

Step 8: Validating Data

To ensure data accuracy, completeness, and consistency, you need to perform data
validation before finalizing data for consumption. Data validation will enable you to
check data against predefined rules and criteria that reflect your requirements,

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 standards, and regulations. The following steps can help you conduct data validation
e"ectively:

Analyze the data to understand its characteristics, such as data types, ranges, and
distributions. Identify potential issues like missing values, outliers, or
inconsistencies.
Select a representative sample from the dataset for validation. This step is
beneficial for large datasets, as it reduces the processing load.
Apply the predefined validation rules to the sampled data. Rules can include
format checks, range validations, or cross-field validations.
Identify records that fail to meet the validation rules. Record the nature of errors
and inconsistencies for further analysis.
Correct identified errors by cleaning, transforming, or imputing data as necessary.
Maintaining an audit trail of changes made during this process is essential.
Automate data validation processes to ensure consistent and ongoing data quality
maintenance whenever possible.

Step 9: Documenting and Sharing Data

Lastly, you must provide metadata and documentation for your data, such as
definitions, descriptions, sources, formats, and types. Your data should be accessible
and usable by other users or applications before consumption.

Use metadata standards and formats to provide metadata for your data, such as
Dublin Core, Schema.org, JSON-LD, etc.
Leverage documentation tools and methods to provide documentation for your
data, such as README files, comments, annotations, etc.
Use data catalog tools and platforms to organize and manage your data and
metadata.
Leverage data sharing tools and methods to make your data available and
accessible by other users or applications, such as APIs, web services, files,
databases, etc.

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 Astera Makes Data Preparation Easy and E"ective
Data preparation is a vital step in the data analysis process, as it ensures the quality
and reliability of the data for modeling and decision-making. However, organizations
need a tool that simplifies data preparation.

Enter Point-and-click data prep!

Astera is a no-code data preparation solution that can help your organization achieve

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 more with your data. By using Astera, you can:

Empower non-technical users to access and manipulate data without coding.

Astera lets you perform various data tasks with user-friendly interfaces and pre-
built templates. You can integrate, cleanse, transform, and enrich data with ease
and e#ciency.
Streamline and accelerate the data preparation process. Astera reduces the need
for IT or data engineering intervention, allowing you to handle your data needs
independently. You can save time and money by automating and simplifying data
workflows.
Ensure data accuracy and consistency. Astera provides tools for data validation
and quality checks. You can detect and correct errors, ensuring that your data is
reliable and ready for analysis.
Facilitate collaboration. Astera allows multiple users to work on data preparation
projects simultaneously. You can share and reuse data assets, enhance
productivity, and foster cross-functional teamwork.

With Astera, you can transform your data into valuable insights faster and more
easily than ever before. Learn more about data preparation tools and how Astera
simplifies data prep.

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