The 2021 – week 40 – Animal adoptions data prep challenge was set up by Jenny. The idea was to let participants play around with the pet data available on Austin Animal Center website and validate their claim that 90 % of the animals entering the center, are adopted, transferred to rescues to their owner. It indeed, was an impressive claim!! So, I decided to give it a go.  The challenge in itself, I found, was pretty simple and straightforward.

Let’s walk through the solution step by step.

1. Connecting to data:

There were two ways to connect to the data. First, using the extract available in the challenge or connecting to the website for updated data. I chose the latter option.

On the website, it was possible to access the data either by downloading the CSV/excel file or via API (which I will talk about later in the blog).

To begin with, I downloaded the data in CSV format and imported it both in Tableau Prep and Alteryx.

2. Filtering and grouping:

The dataset contained a lot of unnecessary fields. And some of the requirement of challenge were:

1. Filter to only cats and dogs (as the other animals had too small a dataset.
2. Group the outcome into 2 groups:

   • Adopted, Returned to Owner or Transferred 
     

   • Others
     

In Tableau Prep, all this was possible to do in single clean step and was fairly easy to do. From within the profile pane, I selected cat and dog, right click and from drop down selected “Keep only”. This got rid of all other animals.

Similarly to group the outcomes, I clicked on the three dots next to field name, selected “Group by” > Manually. This let me manually select the fields to group. Fairly simple and quick.

In Alteryx, I had to use a select tool, a filter tool and a formula tool. While configuring these tools were simple as well, I had to write a long formula to create the two groups.

3. Aggregating and Pivoting:

After the second step, I was left with pretty clean data. This step was done to calculate the % of number of dogs and cats in the dataset that belonged to “Adopted, Returned to Owner or Transferred” and “others” group respectively.

The steps were pretty much same in both Tableau Prep and Alteryx.

4. Output:

Viola, the result was in the desired format. All that was remaining was to output the files. This step is similar as well in both the tools. The difference is in type of formats you can output your results. In Prep, only three output formats are supported (hyper, csv and excel) whereas in Alteryx you have numerous other option as well.

All in all, I found Tableau Prep to be really quick and easy to use especially if the dataset does not require a rigorous and complex preparation. It offered a much better user experience and is a great tool for someone who is a newbie to data prepping.

Having said that, I think Alteryx won in this challenge, as it was possible to use an API to extract data from the website. Solution below: