dataPreparation
Data preparation accounts for about 80% of the work during a data science projet. Let's take that number down. dataPreparation will allow you to do most of the painful data preparation for a data science project with a minimum amount of code.
This package is
- fast (use
data.tableand exponential search) - RAM efficient (perform operations by reference and column-wise to avoid copying data)
- stable (most exceptions are handled)
- verbose (log a lot)
Main preparation steps
Before using any machine learning (ML) algorithm, one need to prepare its data. Preparing a data set for a data science project can be long and tricky. The main steps are the followings:
- Read: load the data set (this package don't treat this point: for csv we recommend
data.table::fread) - Correct: most of the times, there are some mistake after reading, wrong format... one have to correct them
- Transform: aggregating according to a key, computing differences between dates, ... in order to have information usable for a ML algorithm (aka: numeric or categorical)
- Filter: get read of useless information in order to speed up computation
- Handle NA: replace missing values
- Shape: put your data set in a nice shape usable by a ML algorithm
Here are the functions available in this package to tackle those issues:
| Correct | Transform | Filter | Handle NA | Shape |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| findAndTransformDates | diffDates | fastFilterVariables | fastHandleNa | shapeSet |
| findAndTransformNumerics | aggregateByKey | whichAreConstant | setAsNumericMatrix | |
| setColAsCharacter | setColAsFactorOrLogical | whichAreInDouble | ||
| setColAsNumeric | whichAreBijection | |||
| setColAsDate | fastRound |
All of those functions are integrated in the full pipeline function prepareSet.
For more details on how it work go check our tutorial
Getting started: 30 seconds to dataPreparation
Installation
Install the package from CRAN:
install.package("dataPreparation")Install the package from github:
library(devtools)
install_github("ELToulemonde/dataPreparation")Test it
Load a toy data set
library(dataPreparation)
data(messy_adult)
head(messy_adult)Perform full pipeline function
clean_adult <- prepareSet(messy_adult)
head(clean_adult)That's it. For all functions, you can check out documentation and/or tutorial vignette.
How to Contribute
dataPreparation has been developed and used by many active community members. Your help is very valuable to make it better for everyone.
- Check out call for contributions to see what can be improved, or open an issue if you want something.
- Contribute to add new usesfull features.
- Contribute to the tests to make it more reliable.
- Contribute to the documents to make it clearer for everyone.
- Contribute to the examples to share your experience with other users.
- Open issue if you met problems during development.
For more details, please refer to CONTRIBUTING.