Data Education Center: What is Data Wrangling?

Data wrangling, also known as data munging, data franchising, or data preparation, involves transforming raw data into a useful subset of data for business intelligence, analytics, data science and/or AI purposes. 

Data wrangling includes several processes aimed at cleaning and structuring data for analysis. You can perform it manually or through automated tools, which are especially useful for large datasets.  

Why is Data Wrangling Important?

Data wrangling is crucial because it ensures that the data used in analysis is clean, accurate, and correctly formatted. It is fundamental to producing reliable insights and making informed decisions.

Benefits of Data Wrangling:

• Accuracy: Ensures that the data is correct and reliable, leading to valid analysis results.

• Efficiency: Streamlines the data preparation process, saving time and resources.

• Consistency: Standardizes data from multiple sources, making it easier to analyze.

• Actionable Insights: Prepares data in a way that enables deeper and more meaningful analysis.

Skipping data wrangling can result in flawed analysis and poor decision-making. Properly wrangled data supports robust data models and accurate predictions, enhancing business decisions and strategies​.

Challenges Addressed by Data Wrangling:

• Large Data Volumes: Automating data cleaning and transformation to handle big data efficiently.

• Various Data Formats: Converting different formats into a unified structure for analysis.

• Data Quality Issues: Identifying and correcting errors, ensuring data integrity.

• Data Privacy Issues: De-identifying PII or other sensitive data (in realistic ways) renders the data feeding analytics compliant with data privacy laws.

Organizations that invest in thorough data wrangling processes are better positioned to leverage their data for competitive advantage. By addressing these challenges, they can ensure the use of high-quality data that supports accurate and actionable insights​.
 

Key Steps in Data Wrangling

Data wrangling involves several iterative steps that transform raw data into a usable format. Each step plays a crucial role in preparing the data for analysis.

1. Data Collection

• Identifying Sources: Determine where the data will come from, such as databases, APIs, or third-party sources.

• Extracting Data: Collect raw data in its initial format, often requiring planning and coordination across various data sources.

2. Data Cleansing

• Error Detection: Identify and correct errors or inconsistencies within the data.

• Handling Missing Values: Decide whether to fill in missing data, remove incomplete records, or use other methods to address gaps.

3. Data Transformation

• Normalization: Organize data to reduce redundancy and improve integrity.

• Standardization: Ensure data is in a consistent format, such as converting all dates to the same format.

4. Data Enrichment

• Integrating Data: Combine multiple datasets to provide more context or additional insights.

• Adding External Data: Incorporate data from external sources to enhance the dataset's value.

5. Data Validation

• Consistency Checks: Verify that the data is consistent and accurate.

• Quality Assurance: Ensure the data meets the required quality standards for analysis (e.g., data types or formats and value ranges).

6. Data Publishing

• Format Conversion: Convert data into the preferred format for sharing and analysis.

• Documentation: Document the data lineage and steps taken during the wrangling process for transparency and reproducibility​​.

By following these steps, organizations can ensure their data is ready for in-depth analysis and decision-making. Proper data wrangling enhances data quality, leading to more accurate and actionable insights.

Common Challenges in Data Wrangling

Data wrangling, while essential for data analysis, comes with its own set of challenges that data professionals must navigate. Understanding these challenges is crucial to effectively managing and transforming data for accurate and meaningful analysis.

1. Scalability and Performance:

• As organizations generate and collect massive amounts of data, known as Big Data, handling and processing this volume efficiently becomes challenging. For instance, an e-commerce giant like Amazon processes thousands of transactions every minute, requiring powerful and optimized solutions to handle data quickly and effectively.

• Efficient processing tools are necessary to manage large datasets without compromising performance or accuracy, ensuring timely and actionable insights.

2. Handling Unstructured and Semi-Structured Data:

• Data comes in various formats such as text, images, and videos, which traditional databases designed for structured data cannot handle efficiently. For example, analyzing customer reviews involves processing free-flowing text, which requires advanced techniques to extract valuable insights.

• Tools and methods capable of processing these data types are essential for comprehensive data analysis.

3. Evolving Data Sources and Formats:

• With the proliferation of data sources and formats, inconsistencies in data structures pose significant challenges. For instance, integrating customer behavior data from multiple platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn requires handling different data formats and structures.

• Standardizing these diverse data sources is critical to creating a cohesive dataset for analysis.

4. Privacy and Security Concerns:

• Handling sensitive data such as personal information, financial records, or medical histories necessitates strict adherence to privacy and security regulations. For example, healthcare data must comply with regulations like HIPAA, balancing data wrangling needs with compliance requirements.

• Ensuring data security while transforming and integrating data is crucial to maintaining trust and compliance.

5. Dealing with Incomplete or Missing Data:

• Data sets often contain gaps or missing values due to various reasons such as sensor malfunctions or data entry errors. Improper handling of missing data can introduce biases and distort analysis results.

• Implementing thoughtful imputation methods is necessary to address these gaps without compromising data integrity.

6. Managing Noisy Data:

• Noise in data, caused by irrelevant or misleading information, can obscure meaningful patterns. Identifying and mitigating noisy data is essential for accurate analysis and model training.

• Techniques for filtering out noise and focusing on relevant data are crucial for maintaining data quality.

Addressing these challenges requires a combination of advanced tools, techniques, and best practices to ensure high-quality, reliable data for analysis.
 

Best Practices for Effective Data Wrangling

Implementing best practices in data wrangling ensures that the data preparation process is efficient and produces high-quality results. Here are some key practices to consider:

1. Understand Your Data:

• Gain a thorough understanding of your data's structure, format, and the business rules governing it. Knowing the context of your data helps in making informed decisions during the wrangling process.

• Conduct initial exploratory data analysis (EDA) to identify patterns, anomalies, and key attributes.

2. Choose the Right Tools:

• Select data wrangling tools based on the complexity and scale of your data. For small datasets, tools like Excel may suffice, but larger datasets might require advanced tools like Python libraries (Pandas) or cloud-based solutions (AWS, Google Cloud).

• Tools like IRI Voracity, OpenRefine, Trifacta Wrangler, and Talend offer robust features for cleaning and transforming data efficiently.

3. Ensure Data Quality:

• Regularly validate and clean your data to remove errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies. Standardizing data formats and correcting errors ensures that the dataset is reliable and ready for analysis.

• Implement automated data quality checks to streamline the validation process.

4. Collaborate with Data Teams:

• Foster collaboration between data scientists, business analysts, and other stakeholders to align data wrangling efforts with organizational goals. Effective collaboration ensures that the data meets the needs of all users.

• Use collaborative platforms that allow multiple users to work on data wrangling tasks simultaneously.

5. Automate Repetitive Tasks:

• Utilize automation tools and scripts to handle repetitive and time-consuming data wrangling tasks. Automation reduces manual effort and speeds up the data preparation process.

• Tools like Voracity, Apache NiFi and Alteryx offer automation capabilities that enhance efficiency and accuracy.

6. Document Processes:

• Maintain detailed documentation of the data wrangling steps, transformations, and validations performed. Documentation ensures transparency and reproducibility, making it easier to understand and replicate the process.

• Use version control systems to track changes and updates to the data wrangling process.

Data Wrangling Solutions

By adhering to these best practices, organizations can enhance their data wrangling processes, resulting in high-quality data that drives accurate and actionable insights.

In data preparation or wrangling, disparate sources of data are gathered, filtered, denormalized, sorted, aggregated, protected, and reformatted. With this approach, your BI tool can import only the data it needs and in the table or flat file (e.g., CSV, XML) format it needs.

Data visualizations -- and thus answers to your business questions -- come faster when you use IRI Voracity or CoSort to:

• Filter, scrub, join, aggregate, and otherwise transform big data in a single job script and I/O pass

• Build the subsets that dashboard, scatter plot, scorecard, or other analytic tools need and can handle.

Centralized data preparation also avoids reproducing or synchronizing data every time another report is needed.  

Voracity also combines data governance with data wrangling by supporting data quality and data masking rules in the data preparation process.

For more information, see:

https://www.iri.com/products/workbench/voracity-gui/display

https://www.iri.com/solutions/data-integration/implement/analytics

https://www.iri.com/ftp9/pdf/Voracity/DBTA-3Q24-IntegratingDatawithGovernance.pdf