Numerical data: Scrubbing

Apple trees produce a mixture of great fruit and wormy messes. Yet the apples in high-end grocery stores display 100% perfect fruit. Between orchard and grocery, someone spends significant time removing the bad apples or spraying a little wax on the salvageable ones. As an ML engineer, you'll spend enormous amounts of your time tossing out bad examples and cleaning up the salvageable ones. Even a few bad apples can spoil a large dataset.

Many examples in datasets are unreliable due to one or more of the following problems:

Problem category	Example
Omitted values	A census taker fails to record a resident's age.
Duplicate examples	A server uploads the same logs twice.
Out-of-range feature values.	A human accidentally types an extra digit.
Bad labels	A human evaluator mislabels a picture of an oak tree as a maple.

You can write a program or script to detect any of the following problems:

• Omitted values
• Duplicate examples
• Out-of-range feature values

For example, the following dataset contains six repeated values:

Figure 15. The first six values are repeated.

As another example, suppose the temperature range for a certain feature must be between 10 and 30 degrees, inclusive. But accidents happen—perhaps a thermometer is temporarily exposed to the sun which causes a bad outlier. Your program or script must identify temperature values less than 10 or greater than 30:

Figure 16. An out-of-range value.

When labels are generated by multiple people, we recommend statistically determining whether each rater generated equivalent sets of labels. Perhaps one rater was a harsher grader than the other raters or used a different set of grading criteria?

Once detected, you typically "fix" examples that contain bad features or bad labels by removing them from the dataset or imputing their values. For details, see the Data characteristics section of the Datasets, generalization, and overfitting module.

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