New system cleans messy data tables automatically May 12, 2021MIT MIT researchers have created a new system that automatically cleans “dirty data” — the typos, duplicates, missing values, misspellings, and inconsistencies dreaded by data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. The system, called PClean, is the latest in a series of domain-specific probabilistic programming languages written by researchers at the Probabilistic Computing Project that aim to simplify and automate the development of AI applications (others include one for According to surveys conducted by Anaconda and Figure Eight, data cleaning can take a quarter of a data scientist’s time. Automating the task is challenging because different datasets require different types of cleaning, and common-sense judgment calls about objects in the world are often needed (e.g., which of several cities called “Beverly Hills” someone lives in). PClean provides generic common-sense models for these kinds of judgment calls that can be customized to specific databases and types of errors.