Data Wrangling: Cleaning up Ohio Crime Data for Machine Learning

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Often it seems like the biggest part of machine learning is actually acquiring and cleaning up data. The state of Ohio provides crime data in CSV format however the data cannot be used out of the box. I’m sure it is useful for someone but not for running predictions or even BI tools in its current state. So, cleaning the data and formatting it into a way that is useable is a daunting task.

Below is an example of the original data (I clipped off the other crimes as that is not important to show the cleanup and changes required). First, the data is in separate files by year. You could run those files and pull all the data in and do a join but a full-scale cleanup is better for the long-run.

Initial data for 2016:
ohio crime data 2016

The cleaned up version removes empty lines, totals, and general housekeeping. The added columns are: town, year and county.
ohio crime data 2016

In the end the changes weren’t monumental but they were time consuming to do five years of data cleanup manually but worth the work. Next I’ll start showing some predictions based off the cleaned up data.

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