Correcting inconsistency

Now that you've identified that dest_size has whitespace inconsistencies and cleanliness has capitalization inconsistencies, you'll use the new tools at your disposal to fix the inconsistent values in sfo_survey instead of removing the data points entirely, which could add bias to your dataset if more than 5% of the data points need to be dropped.

dplyr and stringr are loaded and sfo_survey is available.

This exercise is part of the course

Cleaning Data in R

Exercise instructions

Add a column to sfo_survey called dest_size_trimmed that contains the values in the dest_size column with all leading and trailing whitespace removed.
Add another column called cleanliness_lower that contains the values in the cleanliness column converted to all lowercase.
Count the number of occurrences of each category in dest_size_trimmed.
Count the number of occurrences of each category in cleanliness_lower.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

# Add new columns to sfo_survey
sfo_survey <- sfo_survey %>%
  # dest_size_trimmed: dest_size without whitespace
  mutate(dest_size_trimmed = ___,
         # cleanliness_lower: cleanliness converted to lowercase
         cleanliness_lower = ___)

# Count values of dest_size_trimmed
sfo_survey %>%
  ___

# Count values of cleanliness_lower
sfo_survey %>%
  ___

Edit and Run Code

This exercise is part of the course

Cleaning Data in R

IntermediateSkill Level

4.8+

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In this chapter, you'll learn how to overcome some of the most common dirty data problems. You'll convert data types, apply range constraints to remove future data points, and remove duplicated data points to avoid double-counting.

Exercise 1: Data type constraints Exercise 2: Common data types Exercise 3: Converting data types Exercise 4: Trimming strings Exercise 5: Range constraints Exercise 6: Ride duration constraints Exercise 7: Back to the future Exercise 8: Uniqueness constraints Exercise 9: Full duplicates Exercise 10: Removing partial duplicates Exercise 11: Aggregating partial duplicates

Categorical and text data can often be some of the messiest parts of a dataset due to their unstructured nature. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to fix whitespace and capitalization inconsistencies in category labels, collapse multiple categories into one, and reformat strings for consistency.

Exercise 1: Checking membership Exercise 2: Members only Exercise 3: Not a member Exercise 4: Categorical data problems Exercise 5: Identifying inconsistency Exercise 6: Correcting inconsistency

Current Exercise

Exercise 7: Collapsing categories Exercise 8: Cleaning text data Exercise 9: Detecting inconsistent text data Exercise 10: Replacing and removing Exercise 11: Invalid phone numbers

In this chapter, you’ll dive into more advanced data cleaning problems, such as ensuring that weights are all written in kilograms instead of pounds. You’ll also gain invaluable skills that will help you verify that values have been added correctly and that missing values don’t negatively impact your analyses.

Exercise 1: Uniformity Exercise 2: Date uniformity Exercise 3: Currency uniformity Exercise 4: Cross field validation Exercise 5: Validating totals Exercise 6: Validating age Exercise 7: Completeness Exercise 8: Types of missingness Exercise 9: Visualizing missing data Exercise 10: Treating missing data

Record linkage is a powerful technique used to merge multiple datasets together, used when values have typos or different spellings. In this chapter, you'll learn how to link records by calculating the similarity between strings—you’ll then use your new skills to join two restaurant review datasets into one clean master dataset.

Exercise 1: Comparing strings Exercise 2: Calculating distance Exercise 3: Small distance, small difference Exercise 4: Fixing typos with string distance Exercise 5: Generating and comparing pairs Exercise 6: Link or join?Exercise 7: Pair blocking Exercise 8: Comparing pairs Exercise 9: Scoring and linking Exercise 10: Score then select or select then score?Exercise 11: Putting it together Exercise 12: Congratulations!