<p>I was reviewing first post questions and came across one seeming totally off-topic tagged <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/data-preprocessing" class="post-tag" title="show questions tagged &#39;data-preprocessing&#39;" rel="tag">data-preprocessing</a>. Curious, I found a lot of ML questions invoking this tag. My gut says "data-preprocessing" is fundamentally off-topic as it's not statistical. Statistics relies on data being already "cleaned": free of typos, formatted correctly, etc. However, distributional properties of data aren't and shouldn't be modified to conform to models, rather it should be <em>vice versa</em>. (Cue the very famous Tukey Quote): "The exact answer to the approximate question is far less valuable than an approximate answer to the exact question."</p>
