Data

What is Data?

 Collection of data objects Attributes

and their attributes
 An attribute is a property Tid Refund Marital Taxable
or characteristic of an Status Income Cheat

object 1 Yes Single 125K No

– Examples: eye color of a 2 No Married 100K No
person, temperature, etc.
3 No Single 70K No

Objects
– Attribute is also known as
variable, field, characteristic, 4 Yes Married 120K No
dimension, or feature 5 No Divorced 95K Yes

 A collection of attributes 6 No Married 60K No

describe an object 7 Yes Divorced 220K No
– Object is also known as 8 No Single 85K Yes
record, point, case, sample, 9 No Married 75K No
entity, or instance
10 No Single 90K Yes
10
Attribute Values

 Attribute values are numbers or symbols

assigned to an attribute for a particular object

 Distinction between attributes and attribute values

– Same attribute can be mapped to different attribute
values
 Example: height can be measured in feet or meters

– Different attributes can be mapped to the same set of

values
 Example: Attribute values for ID and age are integers
– But properties of attribute can be different than the
properties of the values used to represent the
attribute
 Measurement of Length
 The way you measure an attribute may not match the
attributes properties.
5 A 1

B
7 2

C
This scale This scale
8 3
preserves preserves
only the the ordering
ordering D and additvity
property of properties of
length. 10 4 length.

15 5
 Types of Attributes

 There are different types of attributes

– Nominal
 Examples: ID numbers, eye color, zip codes
– Ordinal
 Examples: rankings (e.g., taste of potato chips on a
scale from 1-10), grades, height {tall, medium, short}
– Interval
 Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or
Fahrenheit.
– Ratio
 Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, counts,
elapsed time (e.g., time to run a race)
Properties of Attribute Values

 The type of an attribute depends on which of the

following properties/operations it possesses:
– Distinctness: = 
– Order: < >
– Differences are + -
meaningful :
– Ratios are * /
meaningful
– Nominal attribute: distinctness
– Ordinal attribute: distinctness & order
– Interval attribute: distinctness, order & meaningful
differences
– Ratio attribute: all 4 properties/operations
 Attribute Description Examples Operations
Type
Nominal Nominal attribute zip codes, employee mode, entropy,
values only ID numbers, eye contingency
distinguish. (=, ) color, sex: {male, correlation, 2
Categorical
Qualitative

female} test

Ordinal Ordinal attribute hardness of minerals, median,

values also order {good, better, best}, percentiles, rank
objects. grades, street correlation, run
(<, >) numbers tests, sign tests
Interval For interval calendar dates, mean, standard
attributes, temperature in deviation,
differences between Celsius or Fahrenheit Pearson's
Quantitative
Numeric

values are correlation, t and

meaningful. (+, - ) F tests
Ratio For ratio variables, temperature in Kelvin, geometric mean,
both differences and monetary quantities, harmonic mean,
ratios are counts, age, mass, percent variation
meaningful. (*, /) length, current

This categorization of attributes is due to S. S. Stevens

 Attribute Transformation Comments
Type
Nominal Any permutation of values If all employee ID numbers
were reassigned, would it
make any difference?
Categorical
Qualitative

Ordinal An order preserving change of An attribute encompassing

values, i.e., the notion of good, better best
new_value = f(old_value) can be represented equally
where f is a monotonic function well by the values {1, 2, 3} or
by { 0.5, 1, 10}.

Interval new_value = a * old_value + b Thus, the Fahrenheit and

where a and b are constants Celsius temperature scales
Quantitative
Numeric

differ in terms of where their

zero value is and the size of a
unit (degree).
Ratio new_value = a * old_value Length can be measured in
meters or feet.

This categorization of attributes is due to S. S. Stevens

Discrete and Continuous Attributes

 Discrete Attribute
– Has only a finite or countably infinite set of values
– Examples: zip codes, counts, or the set of words in a
collection of documents
– Often represented as integer variables.
– Note: binary attributes are a special case of discrete
attributes
 Continuous Attribute
– Has real numbers as attribute values
– Examples: temperature, height, or weight.
– Practically, real values can only be measured and
represented using a finite number of digits.
– Continuous attributes are typically represented as floating-
point variables.
Asymmetric Attributes

 Only presence (a non-zero attribute value) is regarded as

important
 Words present in documents
 Items present in customer transactions

 If we met a friend in the grocery store would we ever say

the following?
“I see our purchases are very similar since we didn’t buy most
of the same things.”
Key Messages for Attribute Types

 The types of operations you choose should be

“meaningful” for the type of data you have
– Distinctness, order, meaningful intervals, and meaningful
ratios are only four (among many possible) properties of
data

– The data type you see – often numbers or strings – may not
capture all the properties or may suggest properties that are
not present

– Analysis may depend on these other properties of the data

 Many statistical analyses depend only on the distribution

– In the end, what is meaningful can be specific to domain

Important Characteristics of Data

– Dimensionality (number of attributes)

 High dimensional data brings a number of challenges

– Sparsity
 Only presence counts

– Resolution
 Patterns depend on the scale

– Size
 Type of analysis may depend on size of data
Types of data sets
 Record
– Data Matrix
– Document Data
– Transaction Data
 Graph
– World Wide Web
– Molecular Structures
 Ordered
– Spatial Data
– Temporal Data
– Sequential Data
– Genetic Sequence Data
Record Data

 Data that consists of a collection of records, each

of which consists of a fixed set of attributes
Tid Refund Marital Taxable
Status Income Cheat

1 Yes Single 125K No

2 No Married 100K No
3 No Single 70K No
4 Yes Married 120K No
5 No Divorced 95K Yes
6 No Married 60K No
7 Yes Divorced 220K No
8 No Single 85K Yes
9 No Married 75K No
10 No Single 90K Yes
10
Data Matrix

 If data objects have the same fixed set of numeric

attributes, then the data objects can be thought of as
points in a multi-dimensional space, where each
dimension represents a distinct attribute

 Such a data set can be represented by an m by n matrix,

where there are m rows, one for each object, and n
columns, one for each attribute
Projection Projection Distance Load Thickness
of x Load of y load

10.23 5.27 15.22 2.7 1.2

12.65 6.25 16.22 2.2 1.1
Document Data

 Each document becomes a ‘term’ vector

– Each term is a component (attribute) of the vector
– The value of each component is the number of times
the corresponding term occurs in the document.

timeout

season
coach

game
score
play
team

win
ball

lost
Document 1 3 0 5 0 2 6 0 2 0 2

Document 2 0 7 0 2 1 0 0 3 0 0

Document 3 0 1 0 0 1 2 2 0 3 0
Transaction Data

 A special type of data, where

– Each transaction involves a set of items.
– For example, consider a grocery store. The set of products
purchased by a customer during one shopping trip constitute a
transaction, while the individual products that were purchased
are the items.
– Can represent transaction data as record data

TID Items
1 Bread, Coke, Milk
2 Beer, Bread
3 Beer, Coke, Diaper, Milk
4 Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk
5 Coke, Diaper, Milk
 Graph Data

 Examples: Generic graph, a molecule, and webpages

2
5 1
2
5

Benzene Molecule: C6H6

Ordered Data

 Sequences of transactions
Items/Events

An element of
the sequence
Ordered Data

 Genomic sequence data

GGTTCCGCCTTCAGCCCCGCGCC
CGCAGGGCCCGCCCCGCGCCGTC
GAGAAGGGCCCGCCTGGCGGGCG
GGGGGAGGCGGGGCCGCCCGAGC
CCAACCGAGTCCGACCAGGTGCC
CCCTCTGCTCGGCCTAGACCTGA
GCTCATTAGGCGGCAGCGGACAG
GCCAAGTAGAACACGCGAAGCGC
TGGGCTGCCTGCTGCGACCAGGG
Ordered Data

 Spatio-Temporal Data

Average Monthly
Temperature of
land and ocean
Data Quality

 Poor data quality negatively affects many data processing

efforts

 Data mining example: a classification model for detecting

people who are loan risks is built using poor data
– Some credit-worthy candidates are denied loans
– More loans are given to individuals that default
Data Quality …

 What kinds of data quality problems?

 How can we detect problems with the data?
 What can we do about these problems?

 Examples of data quality problems:

– Noise and outliers
– Wrong data
– Fake data
– Missing values
– Duplicate data
Noise

 For objects, noise is an extraneous object

 For attributes, noise refers to modification of original values
– Examples: distortion of a person’s voice when talking on a poor phone
and “snow” on television screen
– The figures below show two sine waves of the same magnitude and
different frequencies, the waves combined, and the two sine waves with
random noise
 The magnitude and shape of the original signal is distorted
Outliers

 Outliers are data objects with characteristics that

are considerably different than most of the other
data objects in the data set
– Case 1: Outliers are
noise that interferes
with data analysis

– Case 2: Outliers are

the goal of our analysis
 Credit card fraud
 Intrusion detection

 Causes?
Missing Values

 Reasons for missing values

– Information is not collected
(e.g., people decline to give their age and weight)
– Attributes may not be applicable to all cases
(e.g., annual income is not applicable to children)

 Handling missing values

– Eliminate data objects or variables
– Estimate missing values
 Example: time series of temperature
 Example: census results

– Ignore the missing value during analysis

Duplicate Data

 Data set may include data objects that are

duplicates, or almost duplicates of one another
– Major issue when merging data from heterogeneous
sources

 Examples:
– Same person with multiple email addresses

 Data cleaning
– Process of dealing with duplicate data issues

 When should duplicate data not be removed?

Similarity and Dissimilarity Measures

 Similarity measure
– Numerical measure of how alike two data objects are.
– Is higher when objects are more alike.
– Often falls in the range [0,1]
 Dissimilarity measure
– Numerical measure of how different two data objects
are
– Lower when objects are more alike
– Minimum dissimilarity is often 0
– Upper limit varies
 Proximity refers to a similarity or dissimilarity
 Similarity/Dissimilarity for Simple Attributes

The following table shows the similarity and dissimilarity

between two objects, x and y, with respect to a single, simple
attribute.
Euclidean Distance

 Euclidean Distance

where n is the number of dimensions (attributes) and

xk and yk are, respectively, the kth attributes
(components) or data objects x and y.

 Standardization is necessary, if scales differ.

Euclidean Distance

3
point x y
2 p1
p1 0 2
p3 p4
1
p2 2 0
p2 p3 3 1
0 p4 5 1
0 1 2 3 4 5 6

p1 p2 p3 p4
p1 0 2.828 3.162 5.099
p2 2.828 0 1.414 3.162
p3 3.162 1.414 0 2
p4 5.099 3.162 2 0
Distance Matrix
Minkowski Distance

 Minkowski Distance is a generalization of Euclidean

Distance

Where r is a parameter, n is the number of dimensions

(attributes) and xk and yk are, respectively, the kth
attributes (components) or data objects x and y.
Minkowski Distance: Examples

 r = 1. City block (Manhattan, taxicab, L1 norm) distance.

– A common example of this for binary vectors is the
Hamming distance, which is just the number of bits that are
different between two binary vectors

 r = 2. Euclidean distance

 r  . “supremum” (Lmax norm, L norm) distance.

– This is the maximum difference between any component of
the vectors

 Do not confuse r with n, i.e., all these distances are

defined for all numbers of dimensions.
Minkowski Distance

L1 p1 p2 p3 p4
p1 0 4 4 6
p2 4 0 2 4
p3 4 2 0 2
p4 6 4 2 0
point x y
p1 0 2 L2 p1 p2 p3 p4
p2 2 0 p1 0 2.828 3.162 5.099
p3 3 1 p2 2.828 0 1.414 3.162
p4 5 1 p3 3.162 1.414 0 2
p4 5.099 3.162 2 0

L p1 p2 p3 p4
p1 0 2 3 5
p2 2 0 1 3
p3 3 1 0 2
p4 5 3 2 0

Distance Matrix
 Mahalanobis Distance

𝐦𝐚𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐛𝐢𝐬 𝐱, 𝐲 = ((𝐱 − 𝐲)𝑇 Ʃ−1 (𝐱 − 𝐲))-0.5

 is the covariance matrix

For red points, the Euclidean distance is 14.7, Mahalanobis distance is 6.

Mahalanobis Distance

Covariance
Matrix:
0.3 0.2
 
C
0.2 0.3
B A: (0.5, 0.5)
B: (0, 1)
A
C: (1.5, 1.5)

Mahal(A,B) = 5
Mahal(A,C) = 4
Common Properties of a Distance

 Distances, such as the Euclidean distance,

have some well known properties.
1. d(x, y)  0 for all x and y and d(x, y) = 0 if and only
if x = y.
2. d(x, y) = d(y, x) for all x and y. (Symmetry)
3. d(x, z)  d(x, y) + d(y, z) for all points x, y, and z.
(Triangle Inequality)

where d(x, y) is the distance (dissimilarity) between

points (data objects), x and y.

 A distance that satisfies these properties is a

metric
Common Properties of a Similarity

 Similarities, also have some well known

properties.

1. s(x, y) = 1 (or maximum similarity) only if x = y.

(does not always hold, e.g., cosine)
2. s(x, y) = s(y, x) for all x and y. (Symmetry)

where s(x, y) is the similarity between points (data

objects), x and y.
Similarity Between Binary Vectors
 Common situation is that objects, x and y, have only
binary attributes

 Compute similarities using the following quantities

f01 = the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 1
f10 = the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 0
f00 = the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 0
f11 = the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 1

 Simple Matching and Jaccard Coefficients

SMC = number of matches / number of attributes
= (f11 + f00) / (f01 + f10 + f11 + f00)

J = number of 11 matches / number of non-zero attributes

= (f11) / (f01 + f10 + f11)
SMC versus Jaccard: Example

x= 1000000000
y= 0000001001

f01 = 2 (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 1)

f10 = 1 (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 0)
f00 = 7 (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 0)
f11 = 0 (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 1)

SMC = (f11 + f00) / (f01 + f10 + f11 + f00)

= (0+7) / (2+1+0+7) = 0.7

J = (f11) / (f01 + f10 + f11) = 0 / (2 + 1 + 0) = 0

Cosine Similarity

 If d1 and d2 are two document vectors, then

cos( d1, d2 ) = <d1,d2> / ||d1|| ||d2|| ,
where <d1,d2> indicates inner product or vector dot
product of vectors, d1 and d2, and || d || is the length of
vector d.

 Example:
d1 = 3 2 0 5 0 0 0 2 0 0
d2 = 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2
<d1, d2> = 3*1 + 2*0 + 0*0 + 5*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 2*1 + 0*0 + 0*2 = 5
| d1 || = (3*3+2*2+0*0+5*5+0*0+0*0+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0)0.5 = (42) 0.5 = 6.481
|| d2 || = (1*1+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+1*1+0*0+2*2) 0.5 = (6) 0.5 = 2.449
cos(d1, d2 ) = 0.3150
Correlation measures the linear relationship
between objects
Visually Evaluating Correlation

Scatter plots
showing the
similarity from
–1 to 1.
 Drawback of Correlation

 x = (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3)

 y = (9, 4, 1, 0, 1, 4, 9)

yi = xi2

 mean(x) = 0, mean(y) = 4
 std(x) = 2.16, std(y) = 3.74

 corr = (-3)(5)+(-2)(0)+(-1)(-3)+(0)(-4)+(1)(-3)+(2)(0)+3(5) / ( 6 * 2.16 * 3.74 )

=0
Correlation vs Cosine vs Euclidean Distance

 Compare the three proximity measures according to their behavior under

variable transformation
– scaling: multiplication by a value
– translation: adding a constant
Property Cosine Correlation Euclidean Distance
Invariant to scaling Yes Yes No
(multiplication)
Invariant to translation No Yes No
(addition)

 Consider the example

– x = (1, 2, 4, 3, 0, 0, 0), y = (1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 0, 0)
– ys = y * 2 (scaled version of y), yt = y + 5 (translated version)

Measure (x , y) (x , ys) (x , yt)

Cosine 0.9667 0.9667 0.7940

Correlation 0.9429 0.9429 0.9429

Euclidean Distance 1.4142 5.8310 14.2127

Correlation vs cosine vs Euclidean distance

 Choice of the right proximity measure depends on the domain

 What is the correct choice of proximity measure for the
following situations?
– Comparing documents using the frequencies of words
 Documents are considered similar if the word frequencies are similar

– Comparing the temperature in Celsius of two locations

 Two locations are considered similar if the temperatures are similar in
magnitude

– Comparing two time series of temperature measured in Celsius

 Two time series are considered similar if their “shape” is similar, i.e., they
vary in the same way over time, achieving minimums and maximums at
similar times, etc.
Comparison of Proximity Measures

 Domain of application
– Similarity measures tend to be specific to the type of
attribute and data
– Record data, images, graphs, sequences, 3D-protein
structure, etc. tend to have different measures
 However, one can talk about various properties that
you would like a proximity measure to have
– Symmetry is a common one
– Tolerance to noise and outliers is another
– Ability to find more types of patterns?
– Many others possible
 The measure must be applicable to the data and
produce results that agree with domain knowledge
Data Transformation

 Data are transformed or consolidated into forms

appropriate for pattern extraction
 Smoothing: remove noise from the data. Such
techniques include
binning, regression, and clustering.
 Normalization, where the attribute data are
scaled so as to fall within a small specified range,
such as -1.0 to 1.0, or 0.0 to 1.0.
Binning

 Binning, bucketing is a data pre-processing

method used to minimize the effects of small
observation errors.
 The original data values are divided into small
intervals known as bins and then they are
replaced by a general value calculated for that
bin. This has a smoothing effect on the input data
and may also reduce the chances of overfitting in
the case of small datasets.
Binning

 There are 2 methods of dividing data into bins:

 Equal Frequency Binning: bins have an equal
frequency.
 Equal Width Binning : bins have equal width
with a range of each bin are defined as [min + w],
[min + 2w] …. [min + nw] where w = (max – min)
/ (no of bins).
Binning

 Equal frequency:

 Input:[5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 35, 50, 55, 72, 92, 204,
215]

 Output:
 [5, 10, 11, 13]
 [15, 35, 50, 55]
 [72, 92, 204, 215]
Binning

 Equal Width:

 Input: [5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 35, 50, 55, 72, 92, 204,
215]

 Output:
 [5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 35, 50, 55, 72]
 [92]
 [204, 215]
Binning

 Equal frequency: Smoothing by bin means

 Input:[5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 35, 50, 55, 72, 92, 204,
215]

 Output:
 [5, 10, 11, 13] = [10, 10, 10, 10]
 [15, 35, 50, 55] = [39, 39, 39, 39]
 [72, 92, 204, 215] = [146, 146, 146, 146]
Binning

 Equal frequency: Smoothing by bin boundaries

 Input:[5, 10, 11, 13, 15, 35, 50, 55, 72, 92, 204,
215]

 Output:
 [5, 10, 11, 13] = [5, 13, 13, 13]
 [15, 35, 50, 55] = [15, 15, 55, 55]
 [72, 92, 204, 215] = [72, 72, 215, 215]
Normalization
 Min-max normalization: to [new_minA, new_maxA]

v  minA
v'  (new _ maxA  new _ minA)  new _ minA
maxA  minA
– Ex. Let income range $12,000 to $98,000 normalized to
73,600  12 ,000
(1.0  0)  0  0.716
[0.0, 1.0]. Then $73,600 is mapped to
98,000  12 ,000

 Z-score normalization (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation):

v  A
v' 
 A

73,600  54 ,000
 1.225
– Ex. Let μ = 54,000, σ = 16
16,000. Then , 000

 Normalization by decimal scaling

v
v'  j Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1
10
Normalization
 Normalization by decimal scaling

v Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1

v' 
10 j

• Let the input data is: -10, 201, 301, -401, 501, 601, 701
• To normalize the above data,
• Step 1: Maximum absolute value in given data(m): 701
• Step 2: Divide the given data by 1000 (i.e j=3)
• Result: The normalized data is: -0.01, 0.201, 0.301, -0.401, 0.501, 0.601, 0.701
Correlated variables

 Two variables are correlated if changes in one

variable, correspond to changes in the other
 Correlation in general refers to the statistical
association between two variables
– This statistical association allows us to make
estimates for the one variable based on the value of
the other
– While we usually examine linear relationships,
between variables, non-linear might exist too
Linear correlation

 Two variables x and y are said to be linearly

correlated if their relationship can be described
by the following equation:
 This relationship will not be exact

– There will be an error associated with it, and hence, in

reality:

– ε is the error term for the relationship

Perfect linear relationship – no error
Strong linear relationship – small error

Weak linear relationship – large error

No linear relationship
Explanatory Variable and
Response Variable
 Correlation describes linear relationships
between quantitative variables
 X is the quantitative explanatory variable
 Y is the quantitative response variable
 Example: The correlation between per
capita gross domestic product (X) and life
expectancy (Y) will be explored
Data (data file = gdp_life.sav)

Country Per Capita GDP (X) Life Expectancy

(Y)
Austria 21.4 77.48
Belgium 23.2 77.53
Finland 20.0 77.32
France 22.7 78.63
Germany 20.8 77.17
Ireland 18.6 76.39
Italy 21.5 78.51
Netherlands 22.0 78.15
Switzerland 23.8 78.99
United Kingdom 21.2 77.37
 Scatterplot: Bivariate points
(xi, yi)
79.5

79.0 This is the data point

for Switzerland (23.8,
78.99)
78.5

78.0

77.5

77.0
LIFE_EXP

76.5

76.0
18 19 20 21 22 23 24

GDP
Correlational Strength
 It is difficult to judge
correlational strength by
eye alone
 Here are identical data
plotted on differently
axes
 First relationship seems
weaker than second
 This is an artifact of the
axis scaling
 We use a statistical
called the correlation
coefficient to judge
strength objectively
Pearson correlation coefficient

 In statistics, the Pearson correlation coefficient

(PCC)is a correlation coefficient that
measures linear correlation between two sets
of data.
 It is the ratio between the covariance of two
variables and the product of their standard
deviations; thus,
 It is essentially a normalized measurement of
the covariance, such that the result always
has a value between −1 and 1.
Pearson correlation coefficient

 In order to test the linear association between two

variables x and y we can use the Pearson
correlation coefficient rxy
n XY   X  Y
rxy 
[n X 2  ( X ) 2 ][n Y 2  ( Y ) 2 ]
 The correlation coefficient takes values between -1
to 1
– 1: perfect/strong and positive linear correlation
– -1: perfect/strong and negative linear correlation
– 0: no linear correlation
Pearson correlation coefficient

 It is very crucial to understand that this

correlation coefficient can only examine
linear associations between two variables

1 0.8 0.4 0 -0.4 -0.8 -1

What is the correlation here?

Spearman's rank correlation coefficient

 In statistics, Spearman's rank correlation coefficient or Spearman's ρ,

named after Charles Spearman and often denoted by the Greek
letter ρ (rho) or as rs

 It is a nonparametric measure of rank correlation (statistical dependence

between the rankings of two variables)
 The Spearman correlation between two variables is equal to the Pearson
correlation between the rank values of those two variables;
 while Pearson's correlation assesses linear relationships, Spearman's
correlation assesses monotonic relationships (whether linear or not). If
there are no repeated data values, a perfect Spearman correlation of +1 or
−1 occurs when each of the variables is a perfect monotone function of the
other.
Spearman's rank correlation coefficient
Data Preprocessing

 Aggregation
 Sampling
 Discretization and Binarization
 Attribute Transformation
 Dimensionality Reduction
 Feature subset selection
 Feature creation
Aggregation

 Combining two or more attributes (or objects) into a single

attribute (or object)
 Purpose
– Data reduction - reduce the number of attributes or objects
– Change of scale
 Cities aggregated into regions, states, countries, etc.
 Days aggregated into weeks, months, or years
– More “stable” data - aggregated data tends to have less variability
Sampling
 Sampling is the main technique employed for data
reduction.
– It is often used for both the preliminary investigation of
the data and the final data analysis.

 Statisticians often sample because obtaining the

entire set of data of interest is too expensive or
time consuming.

 Sampling is typically used in data mining because

processing the entire set of data of interest is too
expensive or time consuming.
Sampling …

 The key principle for effective sampling is the

following:

– Using a sample will work almost as well as using the

entire data set, if the sample is representative

– A sample is representative if it has approximately the

same properties (of interest) as the original set of data
Sample Size

8000 points 2000 Points 500 Points

Types of Sampling
 Simple Random Sampling
– There is an equal probability of selecting any particular
item
– Sampling without replacement
 As each item is selected, it is removed from the
population
– Sampling with replacement
 Objects are not removed from the population as they
are selected for the sample.
 In sampling with replacement, the same object can
be picked up more than once
 Stratified sampling
– Split the data into several partitions; then draw random
samples from each partition
Sample Size
 What sample size is necessary to get at least one
object from each of 10 equal-sized groups.
Discretization

 Discretization is the process of converting a

continuous attribute into an ordinal attribute
– A potentially infinite number of values are mapped
into a small number of categories
– Discretization is used in both unsupervised and
supervised settings
Binarization

 Binarization maps a continuous or categorical

attribute into one or more binary variables
Attribute Transformation

 An attribute transform is a function that maps the

entire set of values of a given attribute to a new
set of replacement values such that each old
value can be identified with one of the new values
– Simple functions: xk, log(x), ex, |x|
– Normalization
 Refers to various techniques to adjust to
differences among attributes in terms of frequency
of occurrence, mean, variance, range
 Take out unwanted, common signal, e.g.,
seasonality
– In statistics, standardization refers to subtracting off
the means and dividing by the standard deviation
 Curse of Dimensionality

 When dimensionality
increases, data becomes
increasingly sparse in the
space that it occupies

 Definitions of density and

distance between points,
which are critical for
clustering and outlier
detection, become less
meaningful •Randomly generate 500 points
•Compute difference between max and
min distance between any pair of points
Dimensionality Reduction

 Purpose:
– Avoid curse of dimensionality
– Reduce amount of time and memory required by data
mining algorithms
– Allow data to be more easily visualized
– May help to eliminate irrelevant features or reduce
noise

 Techniques
– Principal Components Analysis (PCA)
– Singular Value Decomposition
– Others: supervised and non-linear techniques
Feature Subset Selection

 Another way to reduce dimensionality of data

 Redundant features
– Duplicate much or all of the information contained in
one or more other attributes
– Example: purchase price of a product and the amount
of sales tax paid
 Irrelevant features
– Contain no information that is useful for the data
mining task at hand
– Example: students' ID is often irrelevant to the task of
predicting students' GPA
 Many techniques developed, especially for
classification
Feature Creation

 Create new attributes that can capture the

important information in a data set much more
efficiently than the original attributes

 Three general methodologies:

– Feature extraction
 Example: extracting edges from images
– Feature construction
 Example: dividing mass by volume to get density
– Mapping data to new space
 Example: Fourier and wavelet analysis