DataRinse: Semantic Transforms for Data Preparation Based on Code Mining

Abstract

Data preparation is a crucial first step to any data analysis problem. This task is largely manual, performed by a person familiar with the data domain. DataRinse is a system designed to extract relevant transforms from large scale static analysis of repositories of code. Our motivation is that in any large enterprise, multiple personas such as data engineers and data scientists work on similar datasets. However, sharing or re-using that code is not obvious and difficult to execute. In this paper, we demonstrate DataRinse to handle data preparation, such that the system recommends code designed to help with the preparation of a column for data analysis more generally. We show that DataRinse does not simply shard expressions observed in code but also uses analysis to group expressions applied to the same field such that related transforms appear coherently to a user. It is a human-in-the-loop system where the users select relevant code snippets produced by DataRinse to apply on their dataset.