Integrating Data Smell Identification And Mitigation Techniques: A Methodical Approach To Data Quality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29284/x1g61p81Keywords:
Data Smells, Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, XGBoost, Multi-Layer Perceptron.Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) system reliability mainly depends on the input data quality. However, subtle issues known as data smells can significantly degrade model performance and reliability. However small issues like data smells can deteriorate the performance and reliability of the model. This study inspects the impact of six categories of data smells -Believability, Consistency, Distribution, Redundancy, Understandability, and Miscellaneous - and evaluate their impact on five models: Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, XGBoost, and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), using the UCI Adult Income dataset. Distribution and Redundancy smells proved most harmful, reducing F1-scores by up to 75% for Logistic Regression and significantly affecting MLP, while ensemble methods showed higher strength. Consistency and other smells had smaller effects on accuracy but caused concerns for interpretability, ethics, and maintainability. This study introduces a Data Smell Severity Index to rank smell types with respect to impact, detection difficulty, occurrence, outline mitigation strategies and future directions like real-time validation and automated detection. Overall, this work provides an empirical foundation for addressing data smells and strengthening the credibility of AI systems.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

