University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

It important to examine your dataset before starting to work with it for a machine learning task to:
- Understand how much missing data there is in the dataset.
- Get an idea of whether the features need further cleaning.
- Understand what techniques to use for analyzing the data.

The first step to analyze a dataset:

Machine Learning Yearning, a free ebook from Andrew Ng, teaches you how to structure Machine Learning projects.
https://www.deeplearning.ai/machine-learning-yearning/

Note: The content of the book is aligned with the Coursera Deeplearning.ai specialization.  https://www.deeplearning.ai/deep-learning-specialization/ 

Machine Learning Yearning (Deeplearning.ai)

Why is it important to examine your dataset before starting to work with it for a machine learning task?

You are carrying out error analysis and counting up what errors the algorithm makes. Which of these datasets do you think you should manually go through and carefully examine, one image at a time?

In data science, missing values (often represented programmatically as `NaN`) occur when entries in a dataset are empty or undefined, resulting from missing data collection or parsing errors. These incomplete records are a persistent challenge in data preprocessing and must be deliberately handled before training a model, typically through either imputation (estimating replacement values) or deletion (discarding the incomplete rows or columns).

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