While looking at a (relatively small, 1.7 million records) big data example of New York Yellow Cab taxi trips, I am coming to the conclusion that the best place (if as we do you are using Microsoft tools) for initial analysis, including the all important first step of finding outliers/errors, is Azure Machine Learning Studio (Azure ML, as opposed to Excel, Power BI or bespoke analysis using e.g. Kendo UI).
Why Azure ML for initial analysis?
- It loads data quite quickly (e.g. just over a minute to import almost 2 million records from an Azure SQL database). This is currently much quicker than Power BI.
- It automatically produces histograms and box plots of numeric fields (see the images below, and above, where the field FareAmount has been selected). We can tell immediately from the box plot that there are several outliers (and in fact probable errors that will need to be either corrected or removed, in that FareAmount should not have negative values!).
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