One of the challenges of conducting a data analysis or any form of research is making decisions. You have to decide primarily two things

1. What to do
2. When to do it

People who are familiar with statistics may know what to do but may struggle with timing or when to do it. Others who are weaker when it comes to numbers may not know what to do or when to do it. Generally, it is rare for someone to know when to do something but not know how to do it.

In this post, we will look at a process that that can be used to perform an analysis in the context of data science. Keep in mind that this is just an example and there are naturally many ways to perform an analysis. The purpose here is to provide some basic structure for people who are not sure of what to do and when. One caveat, this process is focused primarily on supervised learning which has a clearer beginning, middle, and end in terms of the process.

Generally, there are three steps that probably always take place when conducting a data analysis and they are as follows.

1. Data preparation (data mugging)
2. Model training
3. Model testing

Off course, it is much more complicated than this but this is the minimum. Within each of these steps there are several substeps, However, depending on the context, the substeps can be optional.

There is one pre-step that you have to consider. How you approach these three steps depends a great deal on the algorithm(s) you have in mind to use for developing different models. The assumptions and characteristics of one algorithm are different from another and shape how you prepare the data and develop models. With this in mind, we will go through each of these three steps.

Data Preparation

Data preparation involves several substeps. Some of these steps are necessary but general not all of them happen ever analysis. Below is a list of steps at this level

• Data mugging
• Scaling
• Normality
• Dimension reduction/feature extraction/feature selection
• Train, test, validation split

Data mugging is often the first step in data preparation and involves making sure your data is in a readable structure for your algorithm. This can involve changing the format of dates, removing punctuation/text, changing text into dummy variables or factors, combining tables, splitting tables, etc. This is probably the hardest and most unclear aspect of data science because the problems you will face will be highly unique to the dataset you are working with.

Scaling involves making sure all the variables/features are on the same scale. This is important because most algorithms are sensitive to the scale of the variables/features. Scaling can be done through normalization or standardization. Normalization reduces the variables to a range of 0 – 1. Standardization involves converting the examples in the variable to their respective z-score. Which one you use depends on the situation but normally it is expected to do this.

Normality is often an optional step because there are so many variables that can be involved with big data and data science in a given project. However, when fewer variables are involved checking for normality is doable with a few tests and some visualizations. If normality is violated various transformations can be used to deal with this problem. Keep mind that many machine learning algorithms are robust against the influence of non-normal data.

Dimension reduction involves reduce the number of variables that will be included in the final analysis. This is done through factor analysis or principal component analysis. This reduction  in the number of variables is also an example of feature extraction. In some context, feature extraction is the in goal in itself. Some algorithms make their own features such as neural networks through the use of hidden layer(s)

Feature selection is the process of determining which variables to keep for future analysis. This can be done through the use of regularization such or in smaller datasets with subset regression. Whether you extract or select features depends on the context.

After all this is accomplished, it is necessary to split the dataset. Traditionally, the data was split in two. This led to the development of a training set and a testing set. You trained the model on the training set and tested the performance on the test set.

However, now many analyst split the data into three parts to avoid overfitting the data to the test set. There is now a training a set, a validation set, and a testing set. The  validation set allows you to check the model performance several times. Once you are satisfied you use the test set once at the end.

Once the data is prepared, which again is perhaps the most difficult part, it is time to train the model.

Model training

Model training involves several substeps as well

1. Determine the metric(s) for success
2. Creating a grid of several hyperparameter values
3. Cross-validation
4. Selection of the most appropriate hyperparameter values

The first thing you have to do and this is probably required is determined how you will know if your model is performing well. This involves selecting a metric. It can be accuracy for classification or mean squared error for a regression model or something else. What you pick depends on your goals. You use these metrics to determine the best algorithm and hyperparameters settings.

Most algorithms have some sort of hyperparameter(s). A hyperparameter is a value or estimate that the algorithm cannot learn and must be set by you. Since there is no way of knowing what values to select it is common practice to have several values tested and see which one is the best.

Cross-validation is another consideration. Using cross-validation always you to stabilize the results through averaging the results of the model over several folds of the data if you are using k-folds cross-validation. This also helps to improve the results of the hyperparameters as well.  There are several types of cross-validation but k-folds is probably best initially.

The information for the metric, hyperparameters, and cross-validation are usually put into  a grid that then runs the model. Whether you are using R or Python the printout will tell you which combination of hyperparameters is the best based on the metric you determined.

Validation test

When you know what your hyperparameters are you can now move your model to validation or straight to testing. If you are using a validation set you asses your models performance by using this new data. If the results are satisfying based on your metric you can move to testing. If not, you may move back and forth between training and the validation set making the necessary adjustments.

Test set

The final step is testing the model. You want to use the testing dataset as little as possible. The purpose here is to see how your model generalizes to data it has not seen before. There is little turning back after this point as there is an intense danger of overfitting now. Therefore, make sure you are ready before playing with the test data.

Conclusion

This is just one approach to conducting data analysis. Keep in mind the need to prepare data, train your model, and test it. This is the big picture for a somewhat complex process