Nitin Goyal: Data Analysis and Data Cleaning

By Will Shoukri

Welcome back to another beautiful week perched here in the Owls Nest. This week I had the pleasure of interviewing data analyst Nitin Goyal. Nitin graduated from UBC with a degree in marketing. After his graduation he worked as a marketing coordinator for UBC, that’s where he found his love for data. He would go on to work for Hootsuite as a data analyst for almost six years before recently moving to Perpetua where he also does data analysis.

 

Data Analysis: Just what is it?

As many students may not be entirely familiar with what data analysis actually entails, that’s where I started my questioning. I wanted to know just how much math is done in Nitin’s daily work.

“As a data analyst you need to know math, but it isn’t all complicated. I would say in my daily work most of the math I do is just addition, subtraction, and some division; maybe creating formulas on Excel.”

So there is certainly math involved in this profession, but most of it isn’t done by the actual data analyst.

“Most of the time you rely on tools and technology – a lot of the legwork is automatically done for you.”

So luckily theres no pen-and-paper algebra and calculus.

 

Data Cleaning? What is it?

Next, I wanted to touch on a term that Nitin had briefly mentioned: data cleaning. What is data cleaning?

“Data cleaning is the act of making sure any that your data is valid. The data needs to be filtered to be cleaned of any impurities.”

As much as that was a great answer, it opened up a whole other line of questioning.

 

What are data “impurities”

Now that I knew why we needed to “clean” data, I needed to know just what we were cleaning.

“Impurities are any data that was input incorrectly. If you think about a Google form, there is often a place for respondents to put their email addresses. If they fill it out incorrectly, that is an example of impure data.”

So, data impurities are simply data points where something went wrong in their creation.

That’s all for me this week from the Owls Nest. I’d strongly recommend you reach out to Nitin on Linkedin; he is a fantastic resource.

Tune in next week, where I’ll be interviewing content producer Kyle Thomas.