Walk Before You Run: The Importance of Data Exploration for Data Analysis Agents
LLM-based data-analysis tools are increasingly used to help users analyze messy spreadsheets and workbooks, from answering questions over uploaded files to generating code, summaries, and visualizations. These systems are often evaluated by the correctness of their final downstream answers. However, reliable data analysis also depends on an earlier step: understanding what the dataset contains before solving the requested task. For complex workbooks, this Data Exploration step includes identifying the logical tables behind physical sheets, interpreting column semantics, recovering keys and relationships, and detecting quality issues. In current tools and benchmarks, this step is usually l...
| Authors | Yike Yuan, Virum Ranka, Tina Lasisi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.DB |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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