Thursday, October 25, 2012

Data Cleansing

What is Data Cleansing ? 

Data cleansing (or ‘data scrubbing’) is detecting and then correcting or removing corrupt or inaccurate records from a record set.
After cleansing, a data set will be consistent with other similar data sets in the system. The inconsistencies detected or removed may have been caused by different data dictionary definitions of similar entities in different stores, or caused by user entry errors or data which was corrupted in transmission or storage. Preprocessing the data will also guarantee that it is unambiguous, correct, and complete.
The actual process of data cleansing may involve removing typos or validating and correcting values against a known list of entities. The validation may be strict such as rejecting any address that does not have a valid ZIP code or fuzzy such as correcting records that partially match existing, known records. Data cleansing differs from data validation in that validation almost invariably means data is rejected from the system at entry and is performed at entry time, rather than on batches of data.

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