An IT services company is verifying data quality for an AI project aimed at predicting...

PMI-CPMAI emphasizes that data quality assessment must precede data preparation and modeling. The recommended technique at this stage is exploratory data analysis (EDA) to understand whether the data is fit for the AI use case. EDA allows the project team to examine distributions, detect missing values, outliers, noise, inconsistencies, data drift, and potential bias.

In the AI lifecycle view adopted by PMI, the data assessment step focuses on profiling data before investing effort in cleaning, transformation, or feature engineering. EDA gives insight into whether the available logs and telemetry (such as server performance metrics for downtime prediction) contain sufficient signal, appropriate time coverage, and consistent labeling to support reliable modeling. This aligns with PMI’s guidance that project managers should “confirm that the dataset is adequate in completeness, accuracy, and relevance to the business objective before proceeding with preparation and modeling” (paraphrased from PMI AI data practices guidance).

Other options like data augmentation or advanced labeling are downstream enhancement techniques, and cost-benefit analysis is a management tool, not a data quality method. To decide whether to proceed with data preparation, the most suitable technique is exploratory data analysis (EDA).