7.4 Summary
This chapter expanded on the core features of the inspection notebook. We looked at handling cardinal data (measures and counts), ordinal data (dates and ranks), and nominal data (codes like account numbers).
Our primary objective was to get a complete view of the data, prior to formalizing our analysis pipeline. A secondary objective was to leave notes for ourselves on outliers, anomalies, data formatting problems and other complications. A pleasant consequence of this effort is to be able to write some functions that can be used downstream to clean and normalize the data we’ve found.
Starting in Chapter 9, Project 3.1: Data Cleaning Base Application, we’ll look at refactoring these inspection functions to create a complete and automated data cleaning and normalization application. That application will be based on the lessons learned while creating inspection notebooks.
In the next chapter, we’ll look at one more lesson that’s often learned...