How to Clean Machine Learning Datasets Using Pandas ActiveState

The first step in any machine learning project is typically to clean your data by removing unnecessary data points, inconsistencies and other issues that could prevent accurate analytics results. Data cleansing can comprise up to 80% of the effort in your project, which may seem intimidating (and it certainly is if you attempt to do it by hand), but it can be automated. In this post, we'll walk through how to clean a dataset using Pandas, a Python open source data analysis library included in ActiveState's Python. All the code in this post can be found in my Github repository. If you already have Python installed, you can skip this step.