Consolidation is the process of combining multiple elements into a single, more effective or coherent whole.
In the context of data analytics, consolidation would involve merging similar fields to reduce the overall number of fields in a dataset. This is particularly useful when a dataset contains redundant or similar data across multiple fields, as it helps to simplify the data structure and improve efficiency. Techniques such as dimensionality reduction are often applied to achieve this, where the goal is to retain the most informative and representative features of the data while reducing the number of total features.
References:
* Applied Dimensionality Reduction - 3 Techniques using Python1.
* Seven Techniques for Data Dimensionality Reduction2.
* Best practices when working with datasets3.
* Effectively Handling Large Datasets4.