Chapter 2. Data Munging

We are just getting into action with data! In this chapter, you'll learn how to munge data. What does munging data imply?

The term munge is a technical term coined about half a century ago by the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Munging means to change, in a series of well-specified and reversible steps, a piece of original data to a completely different (and hopefully more useful) one. Deep-rooted in hacker culture, munging is often described in the data science pipeline using other, almost synonymous, terms such as data wrangling or data preparation. It is a very important part of the data engineering pipeline.

Starting from this chapter, we will start mentioning more jargon and technicalities taken from the fields of probability and statistics (such as probability distributions, descriptive statistics, and hypothesis testing). Unfortunately, we cannot explain all of them in detail since our main purpose is to provide you...