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Data Cleansing: Hockey Edition

Stacia Varga has a post covering some of the yeoman’s work of data cleansing:

For now, Power BI continues to my tool of choice for my project. My goals for today’s post are two-fold: 1) finish my work to address missing venues in the games table and 2) to investigate the remaining anomalies in the games and scores tables as I noted in my last post.

To recap, I noted the following data values that warranted further investigation :

  • Total Goals minimum of 0 seems odd – because hockey games do not end in ties. I would expect a minimum of 0 so I need to determine why this number is appearing.

  • Total Goals maximum of 29 seems high – it implies that either one team really smoked the opposing team or that both teams scored highly. I’d like to see what those games look like and validate the accuracy.

  • Record Losses minimum of 0 seems odd also – that means at least one team has never had a losing season?

  • Similarly, Record Wins minimum of 0 means one team has never won?

  • Record OT minimum of 0 – I’m not sure how to interpret. I need to look.

  • Score minimum of 0 seems to imply the same thing as Total Goals minimum of 0, which I have already noted seems odd.

This is the kind of stuff that we talk about as taking 80-95% of a data science team’s time.  It’s all about finding “weird” looking values, investigating those values, and determining whether the input data really was correct or if there was an issue.