Machine learning algorithms (ML) help a business find patterns in data. Businesses use these patterns to make predictions regarding new data points. If you use poor-quality data in an ML model, it will not be accurate and will never give correct predictions in order to help with business growth.

Often, real-world data is incomplete and inconsistent, lacking in certain attributes and having several errors. Therefore, data preparation is a crucial phase in machine learning. The process of constructing datasets correctly and transforming raw data into a valuable and efficient format is known as data preparation.

What is Data in Machine Learning?

Learning from data is a component of predictive modeling projects. Examples of cases from the domain that is representative of the issue you’re trying to address are referred to as data. In supervised learning, examples make up the data, and each example has both an input element that will be used to build a model and an output or target element that the model is expected to predict.

Tabular data or structured data are standard terms for the most popular kind of input data. The input data might be in the form of an image, a time series, text, a video, or another format. This information may appear in a database, a spreadsheet, or a comma-separated variable (CSV) file.

Imagine a big table of data. This data table is referred to as a matrix in linear algebra. There are rows and columns in the table. A row, also known as an “example,” “instance,” or “case,” represents one example from the issue area. The characteristics of the example are represented by a column, which is sometimes referred to as a “variable,” “feature,” or “attribute.”

It is a common practice to extract and store the data in CSV format from spreadsheets and databases. This is a typical representation that is adaptable, well-understood, and prepared for predictive modeling with no reliance on the outside world.

What is Data Preparation?

The act of obtaining raw data and preparing it for ingestion in an analytics platform is known as data preparation. The data must be cleaned, structured, and turned into something that analytics tools can understand in order to complete the last stage of preparation. These are generalizations, and the real procedure may involve a variety of processes, including combining or splitting rows and columns, changing formats, removing pointless or useless data, and correcting data.

Businesses are using data for a number of reasons. One of those various reasons is to make informed decisions in order to execute successful sales and marketing campaigns. However, all of these cannot be implemented with only raw data. It is essential to collect, cleanse, and process the data to prepare it, as it is a precious resource.

Data preparation is the process of preparing data for analysis. It can include many discrete tasks such as loading data or data ingestion, data cleaning, data fusion, data augmentation, and finally, data delivery.

What is the Importance of Data Preparation in ML?

Data labeling, annotation, augmenting, cleansing, and enrichment take a lot of time while preparing data for machine learning models. According to a study, more than 80% of data scientists spend their time on data preparation. However, it may be considered a good sign; ideally, they should spend more time interacting with data while training and evaluating the model for deployment to production.

Building creative business models require the careful processing of data. A wrong combination of good models and valuable data can ruin the effectiveness and performance of the model you aim to construct.

There are several data preparation tools out there that may help you work faster and more effectively. Although there are self-service data preparation tools on the market, managed services have a slight advantage over them due to the internal infrastructure’s scalability, the ability to leverage large data collections from various sources, compliance with different data norms and guidelines, and the availability of expert assistance as and when needed.

Final Thoughts

The performance of predictive models is significantly impacted by data preparation, which is a critical stage in the ML development cycle. Therefore, before starting the training phase, you must first create an accurate dataset. Additionally, it would help if you remembered that different data preparation approaches are appropriate for different datasets and situations.

Data preparation guarantees data accuracy, which produces correct insights. Without data preparation, insights will likely be incorrect because of faulty data, a calibration problem that wasn’t noticed, or a disparity across datasets that is simple to rectify.