The Importance of Data Preparation & Analysis and How Monarch Simplifies this Process
Since the invention of computers, people have used the term data to refer to computer information, and this information was either transmitted or stored. But that is not the only definition of data there exist other types of data as well. So, what is data? Data can be texts or numbers written on papers, or it can be bytes and bits inside the memory of electronic devices, or it could be facts that are stored inside a person’s mind.
The Importance of Data Analysis in a Business
Every company should look into data analysis to get an accurate report on how their company is doing in many aspects. This information can bring to light things you might not even have known about your business.
You can use this data to understand the demographics of your customers, improve your customer service, predict your customer’s behavior in the future, and help you make business decisions.
Data preparation
“Don’t let data tell a wrong and meaningless story”
Data preparation is a very important step in the field of data science where a majority of the time is consumed in preparing and pre-processing the data. Because in the real world data is noisy, incomplete and inconsistent, we cannot use such data for further analysis.
Data preparation is the process of taking raw data and getting it ready for ingestion in an analytics platform. To achieve the final stage of preparation, the data must be cleansed, formatted, and transformed into something digestible by analytics tools. These are broad strokes, and the actual process can include a wide range of steps, such as consolidating/separating fields and columns, changing formats, deleting unnecessary or junk data, and making corrections to data. GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out, so data must be good because it’s a prerequisite for producing effective models of any type.
Altair Monarch
Altair Monarch is a market leading desktop-based self-service data preparation solution tool offered by Altair. Monarch connects to multiple data sources including structured and unstructured data, cloud-based data, and big data. Connecting to data, cleansing and manipulating data requires no coding. Designed for anyone who works with data for a living.
Monarch can quickly convert disparate data formats into rows and columns for use in data analytics. Over 80+ pre-built data preparation functions mean data preparation tasks can be completed quickly and error free. More time is spent on generating value from data as opposed to making data usable to begin with.
Monarch system is easy to use, allowing users to quickly select any data source and automatically convert it into structured data for analysis.
Monarch provides data masking to remove or obscure confidential data such as customer information, medical records and employee IDs with redaction capabilities. This feature allows users to distribute reports to partners and customers, even in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, without compromising customer and employee privacy.
Prepared data can be saved in a variety of native BI formats so users can visualize results not just in popular BI tools such as Tableau, Qlik and Excel. Users can also share and reuse data preparation processes with other Monarch users.
Monarch key features
- Monarch offers a self-service data preparation solution, without needing to code. Monarch efficiently and accurately prepares data for providing meaningful insights. Also, when it comes to ML/AI, monarch displays the fine details of a model’s configuration where one can better understand how predictions are made even for black-box models. Without spending more time in coding decisions can be made immediately and with confidence.
- Monarch allows users to connect all major databases and automatically extracts data from web pages, multi-structured or semi-structured data like PDFs and text files, structured data, spreadsheets and big data.
- Monarch extracts meaningful information from data, provides a platform for data wrangling, helps in data transformation from semi structured to structured data (tabular form), performing joining and blending of two data sources, cleaning the data, visualizing the field statistics in the data, creating new features using existing data as per the business requirements and enriching the data in a click-based interface, exporting to any platform for reporting and visualization. You can automate the entire process, so you never have to do it again.
Altair has a wide range of applications, from ETL, Data Mining, Content Management, and Data Visualization. If an organization’s primary source of data is available in a report format, Monarch is an excellent solution. It works extremely well for parsing out data from downloaded text files and can even be used to parse data out of scanned pdf documents. For power users, it works very well with databases and SQL. For soft users who just want to glean data out of a downloaded report, it’s very easy to see how it works. For anyone who has ever tried to use Excel to open and parse a text file, Monarch is sure to provide lasting relief!
Fast and easiest way to prepare data for best decision making, Monarch provides a very vibrant and helpful community.