The detection and treatment of outliers

In data science, examples are at the core of learning from data processes. If unusual, inconsistent, or erroneous data is fed into the learning process, the resulting model may be unable to correctly generalize the accommodating of any new data. An unusually high value present in a variable, apart from skewing descriptive measures such as the mean and variance, may also distort how many machine learning algorithms learn from data, causing distorted predictions as a result.

When a data point deviates markedly from the others in a sample, it is called an outlier. Any other expected observation is labeled an inlier.

A data point may be an outlier due to the following three general causes (and each one implies ...

Get Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.