Tag archive for ‘Data Quality’
We often give Excel our data, and trust it to do the right thing. There was a link posted on meta-filter today that sparked some lively discussion amongst the crowd. The Excel auto formating “feature” loves to scramble common genetic nomenclature. It turns out that in the genetics field, common codes get converted to incorrect […]
-
Excel auto formating is getting into your genes
We often give Excel our data, and trust it to do the right thing. There was a link posted on meta-filter today that sparked some lively discussion amongst the crowd. The Excel auto formating “feature” loves to scramble common genetic nomenclature. It turns out that in the genetics field, common codes get converted to incorrect […]
-
Fake Data
Its amazing how hard it is to make fake data. If you don’t believe me you probably havn’t tried it. By this I mean data that provides a reasonable test set for data analysis – not trying to fake data for some shady or illicit purpose. (I imagine, in some ways that might actually be […]
-
Setting the stage: managing data issues
Anyone who has done any data analysis with more than a few lines of data knows that some of the biggest time wasters are data quality issues. What is bad data?  Well, some of it is easy to see, some is downright impossible to find. Lets look at an easy example; a row of data where the country […]
