This chapter has given an overview of how to convert attributes into different formats, extract additional information from them, as well as create new attributes. You will do this a lot.

Of particular importance is the use of regular expressions, and this chapter has given the first detail relating to their effective use. If there is one thing that is worth becoming proficient at to get the best out of RapidMiner Studio, it is regular expressions and this chapter shows that. In reality, it is not too difficult to get to an effective level to be very productive.

Having got to this point, we have done the initial import of data and have got the attributes we need. Now, we will start to look at the data in more detail; the next chapter considers outliers, which are points that do not seem to fit with the rest of the data.