Data Preprocessing Steps: How to Clean Business Data

Cleaning business data in the wrong order inflates forecasts and leaks validation data into training models. We break down the strict seven-step sequence for preprocessing sales and financial extracts: profiling and deduplicating raw tables, fencing off an 80/20 split, imputing missing values without skewing averages, encoding categories without fake rankings, taming outliers with RobustScaler, and locking fitted transformations into a repeatable pipeline so dashboards stop drifting between u...