The importance of data cleaning

August 22, 2010 Tags: , , ,

Data is only as useful if it’s accurate, and if it isn’t, unwary users can be lead astray. Bad decisions are often the result of bad data, or worse, no data at all. In mechanical engineering, clean and accurate data is an absolute necessity. Imagine if you didn’t know quite how strong a component really was because of an incomplete or gappy data set? That’s bad news.

Unfortunately, poor quality data is not at all uncommon. In all fields (even in mechanical engineering and other hard and supposedly precise sciences) people at all levels are much too inclined to take data at face value, without looking too hard at its provenance and level of precision.

If your data does prove to be scrappy and problematic when it is examined closely, all is not lost. Our data cleansing services can help transform a poor data set into something that is usable at the best possible accuracy. Holes may be reparable through interpolation or inference and it may be possible to reduce noise levels or remove interfering signals.

The data output from older measuring equipment and system software programs can also be problematic in format. In these cases the numbers are accurate enough, but picking them out of obscure placements and positions may not be simple. In fact, the process of just getting old data into a readable format can be very time consuming without the right expertise.  Get in touch today and see what we can do for your data.

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