Walk Before You Run: The Importance of Data Exploration for Data Analysis Agents

Excerpt

arXiv:2608.16045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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 workbo