negative numbers

[suzmee23]

Hi, We are students and would like to use your data for my Uni assignment. As we were going through the data, we found some numbers with 'negative - ' sign. May we know what does that mean?

[M3IT]

It usually means a correction to previous numbers, generally that the issuing authority has provided erroneous numbers and the negative value corrects the error. You'll also see some very large positive values - these are often also corrections. If there is a specific date you're interested in, let me know and I'll try to find out.

[suzmee23]

Thank you for letting us know the meaning of those strange numbers, it helped us understand the data better. So, what would you suggest we do with those strange numbers? Should we exclude those numbers from our analysis or is there a way to find out what the actual numbers were. Eg. row 9349 has large negative number so, what should i do to get the right value of it or should I simply not include that entire row in analysis?

Hoping to hear from you and Thank you

[M3IT]

Which file are your you referring to and what date?

[suzmee23]

File name is COVID_AU_state , date 07/04/2023 for Queensland. Thank you

[M3IT]

Welcome to world of data science where data is often dirty!

These types of questions are difficult to answer and it's up to the individual analyst to define assumptions and fixes. You'll note in this case that there was a jump similar in magnitude 1 year earlier, so this large drop may have been correcting that data. However, if you plot them, you'll see that they don't match exactly, so that's not likely the cause (or at least the only cause).

[suzmee23]

Thank you so much for some very meaningful discussion on this matter.