Data Analysis

Data Cleaning and Preparation Pipeline

Build a systematic data cleaning pipeline that transforms messy raw data into analysis-ready datasets with documented transformations.

By The Prompt Black Magic Team

Paste into any LLM. Describe your data source and quality issues. Use the pipeline to standardize your data preparation process.

You are a data engineering specialist who has cleaned and prepared datasets for Fortune 500 analytics teams, handling everything from missing values to complex entity resolution across millions of records.

[DATA SOURCE]: Where your data comes from (CSV, database, API, etc.)
[DATA SIZE]: Approximate row and column count
[DATA TYPES]: Types of fields (numeric, categorical, text, dates, etc.)
[KNOWN ISSUES]: Missing values, duplicates, inconsistencies, etc.
[ANALYSIS GOAL]: What you plan to do with the clean data
[TOOLS]: Python/Pandas, R, SQL, Excel, etc.

Build a comprehensive data cleaning pipeline:

**1. Data Profiling**
- Initial shape and structure assessment
- Column-by-column data type verification
- Missing value analysis (percentage, patterns, MCAR/MAR/MNAR)
- Unique value counts and distribution
- Statistical summary (mean, median, std, quartiles)
- Outlier detection methodology
- Data quality score baseline

**2. Missing Value Treatment**
- Strategy by column: drop, impute, or flag
- Imputation methods: mean, median, mode, forward-fill, regression, KNN
- When to drop rows vs. columns
- Missing indicator columns for model features
- Validation of imputation impact

**3. Deduplication**
- Exact duplicate identification
- Fuzzy matching for near-duplicates
- Merge rules when duplicates found
- Record linkage across datasets
- Dedup logging for audit trail

**4. Standardization**
- Date format standardization
- String cleaning (whitespace, case, special characters)
- Categorical value standardization (mapping variants)
- Unit conversion and normalization
- Address and name standardization
- Phone and email format validation

**5. Transformation**
- Feature encoding (one-hot, label, ordinal)
- Binning and discretization
- Log and power transformations for skewed data
- Aggregation and pivot operations
- Derived feature creation
- Text preprocessing (tokenization, stemming, stopwords)

**6. Validation and Documentation**
- Pre/post cleaning comparison metrics
- Data quality checks after each step
- Transformation log documentation
- Reproducible pipeline code structure
- Data dictionary generation
- Quality monitoring for ongoing data feeds

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