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CMA Intermediate · Financial Management and Business Data Analytics · Data Processing, Organisation, Cleaning and Validation

In a payroll file, the 'Date of Joining' column holds dates in mixed formats such as 05/03/2021, 2021-03-05 and 5 March 2021. Which data quality dimension is mainly violated, and what is the proper remedy?

The issue is a consistency violation, fixed by standardising every date to one format. The same field is stored in several formats, which hampers sorting and calculations. Timeliness, uniqueness and completeness relate to data currency, duplicates and missing values, which are not the problem.

  1. ATimeliness; refresh the file more often
  2. BUniqueness; delete repeated rows
  3. CConsistency; standardise all entries to one date formatCorrect
  4. DCompleteness; impute the blank cells

Explanation

The same type of information is recorded in different formats, so the problem is inconsistency of representation. The remedy is standardisation to a single format, such as DD-MM-YYYY. Timeliness concerns how current data is, uniqueness concerns repeated records, and completeness concerns missing values; none are the issue here.

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