Cleaning Big Data and Visualizing It with Python and R

Somanathan Gohulan
4 min readMar 21, 2023

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In today’s data-driven world, big data has become an essential part of businesses, research, and decision-making. However, working with big data poses many challenges, including data quality, consistency, and format. In this article, we will explore how to clean big data and visualize it using Python and R, two popular programming languages for data analysis.

Cleaning Big Data with Python and R

Data cleaning, also known as data wrangling, is the process of identifying and correcting or removing data that is incorrect, incomplete, or irrelevant. It’s an essential step in data analysis that ensures data quality and accuracy, leading to better insights and decision-making. Here are some common data cleaning techniques and tools, implemented in both Python and R:

Removing duplicates

Duplicate data can skew analysis and cause errors in models. Here’s how to remove duplicates in Python using Pandas:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv(‘data.csv’)
df.drop_duplicates(inplace=True)

And here’s how to remove duplicates in R using the dplyr package:

Handling missing data

Missing data is a common problem in big data, and it can affect the accuracy of analysis. Here’s how to handle missing data in Python using NumPy:

And here’s how to handle missing data in R using the tidyr package:

Fixing inconsistent formatting

Inconsistent formatting can cause problems in analysis and make it difficult to work with data. Here’s how to fix inconsistent formatting in Python using Pandas:

And here's how to fix inconsistent formatting in R using the lubridate package:

Visualizing Big Data with Python and R

Data visualization is the process of representing data in a visual format, such as charts, graphs, or maps. It’s an effective way to communicate complex information and identify trends and patterns that may not be apparent in raw data. Here are some popular visualization techniques, implemented in both Python and R:

Bar charts

Bar charts are a common way to compare values across categories. Here’s how to create a bar chart in Python using Matplotlib:

And here’s how to create a bar chart in R using the ggplot2 package:

Scatter plots

Scatter plots are a useful way to visualize the relationship between two variables. Here, we will demonstrate how to create a scatter plot using Python and R. We will use the “iris” dataset, which is included in both Python and R by default. The dataset contains measurements of the length and width of petals and sepals for three different species of iris flowers.

In this code, we first import the seaborn and matplotlib.pyplot libraries. We then load the iris dataset using the load_dataset() function from seaborn. We create a scatter plot using the scatterplot() function from seaborn, specifying the x-axis variable, y-axis variable, and hue variable (which colors the points by species). We add a title, x-axis label, and y-axis label using plt.title(), plt.xlabel(), and plt.ylabel(), respectively. Finally, we show the plot using plt.show().

R Code:

In this code, we first load the ggplot2 library. We load the iris dataset using the datasets::iris syntax. We create a scatter plot using the ggplot() function, specifying the data frame, x-axis variable, y-axis variable, and color variable (which colors the points by species). We add points to the plot using geom_point(). We add a title, x-axis label, and y-axis label using labs().

Overall, scatter plots are a simple and effective way to visualize the relationship between two variables in big data. Both Python and R offer easy ways to create scatter plots using built-in datasets and libraries.

All code can be found at :- https://github.com/Gohulan

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Somanathan Gohulan

Happiest person,Too much of Interest in Technology, Programmer, Positive attitude n all walks of life