Cleaning and preparing data for analysis
Daniel H. Baker · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022
This chapter examines the concept of cleaning and preparing data for analysis. It starts with the messiness of collecting real data since any study of factors can affect the results. The common methods for checking data visually are histograms and scatterplots. Plotting data will often reveal obvious outlying values generated by a different process from the rest of the data set. Outliers will then be either deleted, replaced with estimated values, or left within the data set. The chapter notes several useful methods of checking distributions and rescaling data. It explains the practical issue of how to format data appropriately for use in R.