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Stop 08 · Data Cleaning & WranglingTopics · 6/9

Standardizing & Normalizing Data

Part of the Data Analyst Roadmap

In short

Making values comparable — consistent units, consistent categorical labels ('NY' vs 'New York' vs 'ny'), and, for some statistical methods, rescaling numeric ranges.

How to learn this

  1. 1Standardize a messy categorical column (inconsistent casing/spelling) into clean values.
  2. 2Learn the difference between normalization (0-1 scale) and standardization (z-scores).
  3. 3Practice building a mapping table for messy categorical values to canonical ones.

More topics at this stop

Identifying Data Quality IssuesHandling Missing DataHandling DuplicatesData Type ConversionOutlier HandlingData Validation RulesETL Basics (Extract, Transform, Load)Documenting Data Cleaning Decisions

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