26/11/2024, 10:25 What Is Data Wrangling?

Tools, Benefits, And Examples, PDF - PW Skills

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Data Science

What Is Data Wrangling? Tools, Benefits, and

Examples
By Ankit kumar| October 3, 2024

Data Wrangling is an important process because there is a lot of big data that is present in
an unstructured format, which makes it difficult to extract important information from it.

In today’s digital world, data in various formats is valuable, as it is important for sources of
information and insights. Raw data present in various forms, such as bytes, texts, multimedia,
etc., is converted into many forms to be used by various organizations. Hence, cleaning and
processing data is essential to derive meaningful information and insights from the data.

Data wrangling is the process of converting raw and unprocessed data from one form to
another to make it more recognizable and usable. It is known by many names, such as Data
cleaning, munging, and remediation. Data wrangling is important for cleaning, structuring, and
organizing data in a desired format for better business and useful information.

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Table of Contents
1. What is Data Wrangling?
2. Data Wrangling Process
3. Benefits of Data Wrangling
3.1. 1. Data Quality
3.2. 2. Consistency
3.3. 3. Improved Efficiency
3.4. 4. Better Insights and Decision Making
3.5. 5. Saves Time and Resources
4. Tools Used For Data Wrangling
5. Examples of Data Wrangling
5.1. Recommended Course
6. Data Wrangling FAQs
6.1. Q1. What is data wrangling?
6.2. Q2. Why is data wrangling used?
6.3. Q3. What are the various steps involved in data wrangling?
6.4. Q4. What are some tools used for data wrangling?

What is Data Wrangling?

Data Wrangling is known by many names, such as Data Cleaning, Data munging, and Data
remediation. It is the process of collecting, cleaning, and converting raw data into a structured
format for data analysis and decision-making process.

Hence, it is important to process these data and organize them to extract important pieces of
information.

It also helps to increase the accuracy and readability of the raw data. With the help of data
wrangling, more and more complex data can be handled easily once it is structured. Hence,
data wrangling is important for all the big companies that heavily rely on data for their daily
work. There are four significant steps in the data wrangling process.

Data Wrangling Process

Data wrangling takes a series of stages to process data in a desired format. Let us understand
the complete process of Data wrangling below.

1. Data Collection: This is the first process where data is collected from various sources.
There are many data sources, as it is present in various forms, such as electronic bytes,
texts, audio, images, etc.

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2. Data Cleaning: The data collected is generally in raw and unstructured format. In this
stage, all the irregularities and inconsistencies in data are processed and removed.
3. Data Transformation: In this process, data is restructured into a structured format,
which may involve converting data types, renaming, arranging data, etc.
4. Data Enrichment: In this stage, some additional information is fed into the dataset
prepared.
5. Data Integration: Data, after processing from various sources, are combined into a
single, unified dataset based on common factors.
6. Data Formatting: Data structures are now formatted into the form of tables, CSV files,
or databases with the help of Excel, SQL, etc.
7. Data Publishing: This is the last stage of Data wrangling. It involves making data
available to other users by giving them access to the application.

Also check: What Is the Syllabus of Data Science?

Benefits of Data Wrangling

As discussed above, data wrangling is important when dealing with large, unstructured
datasets. Data wrangling has many benefits that we are going to discuss next.

1. Data Quality
Data wrangling helps us to improve the quality of our raw and unprocessed data by working
on their errors, inconsistencies, and missing values and fixing them. This helps companies
decode complex data easily and make good decisions in the interest of the company.

2. Consistency
As data wrangling structures our data in a usable format, it makes our data more consistent. It
is very important for the business, as it helps in achieving the objectives and goals of the
company. It is mostly used by companies that rely heavily on input from their users and
process it.

3. Improved Efficiency
Implementing data wrangling improves the efficiency of the dataset as it gets easier to extract
important information. Also, it reduces the work of data analysts by removing errors and
inconsistencies in the dataset. They can easily focus on extracting useful insights.

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4. Better Insights and Decision Making

As our data is well processed, extracting essential insights becomes easy. Also, decision-
making becomes less time-consuming and productive as, in most cases, clean and processed
data provides accurate data analysis.

5. Saves Time and Resources

Nowadays, there are many tools available that can highly automate the data-wrangling
process and help reduce the time and resources used for the process. It not only saves time
and effort but also reduces the cost by a significant amount.

Tools Used For Data Wrangling

There are many tools that can be used for performing various tasks of data wrangling. There
are many programs that can automate the data cleaning process and validate the data during
the process. Let us check out some of the important tools used in the process.

Data Wrangling Tools

Tool Description Used For

Excel Power It is a basic manual data wrangling tool used Can be used for simple
Query as an Excel feature. tasks.

This is an automated data-cleaning tool. It Can be used for large-scale

OpenRefine
requires knowledge of programming. data-cleaning projects

A versatile instrument capable of obtaining

Used for extracting data
Tabula data from various types of documents, such
from documents.
as PDFs

Suitable for cloud-based

Google A Google data service that explores, cleans,
data processing and
DataPrep and prepares data
cleaning.

A tool for cleaning and transforming data

Data Suitable for cleaning and
developed by Stanford University and used
Wrangler changing various data sets.
for data wrangling

A data management tool based on the cloud Ideal for large-scale and
Trifacta that offers intelligent data cleaning and complex data wrangling
transformation features tasks.

Suitable for programming-

It provides data structures and functions to
Pandas oriented data wrangling
manipulate large datasets efficiently.
tasks

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A JavaScript library for creating interactive Suitable for visualizing and

D3.js
data visualizations in web browsers exploring cleaned data

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successful future in programming: Full Stack Data Anlaytics Course. (Active)

Examples of Data Wrangling

There are many fields where data wrangling is used. Let us check some of the most common
cases. \

Deleting Unnecessary data

Removing errors from the dataset
Finding the missing fields in the dataset
Merge data into one data set for data analysis
Fixing inconsistencies

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Data Wrangling FAQs

Q1. What is data wrangling?

Ans: Data Wrangling is the process of converting raw and unprocessed data from
one form to another to make it more recognizable and usable. It is known by many
names, such as Data cleaning, munging, and remediation.

Q2. Why is data wrangling used?

Q3. What are the various steps involved in data wrangling?

Q4. What are some tools used for data wrangling?

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