<h1>Is it okay for me to delete outliers or other data I don't like?</h1>
<p>This is a <em>surprisingly</em> popular question. It's usually phrased in terms of '<a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/254023/do-i-remove-outliers-to-make-the-data-normally-distributed-for-anova">improving normality</a>' or '<a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/584022/unsupervised-learning-clustering-before-supervised-learning">reducing noise</a>' or '<a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/575483/can-i-remove-sample-outliers-using-standard-deviation">improving model performance</a>'.</p>
<p>Most of this stems from bad stats education, basic misunderstandings and a desire to apply a simple technique to data that is ill-suited to it.</p>
<p><strong>As a rule, a data point should not be removed unless it is an error</strong>. Questions that do not explain in sufficient detail why their situation may be an exception to this rule should be closed because any answer would be reiterating a simple point that has been made over and over on this site.</p>
<p>There are several threads about this covering common ground, but the best duplicate target I could find seems to be
<a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/200534/is-it-ok-to-remove-outliers-from-data">Is it OK to remove outliers from data?</a></p>
