DATA P R E P R O C E S S I N G

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W HAT IS D ATA ?

● Collection of data objects and Attributes

their attributes

● An attribute is a property or
characteristic of an object
– Examples: eye color of a
person, temperature, etc.
– Attribute is also known as
variable, field, characteristic,
or feature
● A collection of attributes Objects
describe an object
– Object is also known as record,
point, case, sample, entity, or
instance
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 in {tall, medium, short}
– Interval
 Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or
Fahrenheit.
– Ratio
 Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, time,
counts

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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.
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T Y P E S O F DATA S E T S
● Record
– Data Matrix
– Document Data
– Transaction Data
● Graph
– World Wide Web
– Molecular Structures
● Ordered
– Spatial Data
– Temporal Data
– Sequential Data
– Genetic Sequence Data

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I M P O RTA N T C H A R A C T E R I S T I C S OF
S T R U C T U R E D D ATA

– Dimensionality
 Curse of Dimensionality

– Sparsity
 Only presence counts

– Resolution
 Patterns depend on the scale

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R E C O R D D ATA

● Data that consists of a collection of records, each of

which consists of a fixed set of attributes

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D ATA M AT R I X

● 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 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

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D O C U M E N T D ATA

● 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.

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T R A N S AC T I O N D ATA

● A special type of record data, where

– each record (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.

item

transaction

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G R A P H D ATA

● Examples: Generic graph and H T M L Links

<a href="papers/papers.html#bbbb"> Data

Mining </a>
<li> <a href="papers/papers.html#aaaa">
Graph Partitioning </a>
<li> <a href="papers/papers.html#aaaa">
Parallel Solution of Sparse Linear System of
Equations </a>
<li> <a href="papers/papers.html#ffff"> N-
Body Computation and Dense Linear
System Solvers

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C H E M I C A L D ATA

● Benzene Molecule: C 6 H 6

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O R D E R E D D ATA

● Sequences of transactions

Items/Events

An element of
the 13
sequence
O R D E R E D D ATA

● Genomic sequence data

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O R D E R E D D ATA

● Spatio-Temporal Data

Average Monthly
Temperature of
land and ocean

Trajectories of
Moving Objects

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D ATA Q UA L I T Y

● 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
– missing values
– duplicate data

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NOISE

● 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

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Two Sine Waves Two Sine Waves + Noise
O U TLI E R S

● Outliers are data objects with characteristics that are

considerably different than most of the other data
objects in the data set

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D EVIATION /A NOMALY D E T E C T I O N

 Outliers are useful when we need to detect significant

deviations from normal behavior
 Applications:
⚫ Credit Card Fraud Detection

⚫ Network Intrusion
Detection

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day
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
– Estimate Missing Values
– Ignore the Missing Value During Analysis
– Replace with all possible values (weighted by their
probabilities)

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D U P L I C AT E D ATA

● Data set may include data objects that are duplicates,

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

● Examples:
– Same person with multiple email addresses

● Data cleaning
– Process of dealing with duplicate data issues

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D ATA P R E P R O C E S S I N G
● Aggregation
● Sampling
● Dimensionality Reduction
● Feature subset selection
● Feature creation
● Discretization and Binarization
● Attribute Transformation
A G G R E G A TIO N

● 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
– More “stable” data
 Aggregated data tends to have less variability

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S AM P L I N G
● Sampling is the main technique employed for data
selection.
– It is often used for both the
preliminary investigation of the data and the final
data analysis.

● Statisticians sample because obtaining the entire set of

data of interest is too expensive or time consuming.

● Sampling is used in data mining because processing the

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

● The key principle for effective sampling is the

following:
– using a sample will work almost as well as using the entire
data sets, if the sample is representative

– A sample is representative if it has approximately

the same property (of interest) as the original set of
data

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SAMPLE SIZE

8000 points 2000 Points 500 Points

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CURSE OF D I M E N S I O NA L I T Y

● When dimensionality increases, data becomes

increasingly sparse in the space that it occupies

● Definitions of density and distance between points,

which is critical for clustering and outlier detection,
become less meaningful.
D I M E N S I O NA L I T Y R E D U C T I O N

● 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

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F E AT U R E S U B S E T S E L E C T I O N

● Reduce dimensionality of data

Remove:
● 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' G PA 29
F E AT U R E S U B S E T S E L E C T I O N

● Techniques:
– Brute-force approch:
 Try all possible feature subsets as input to data mining algorithm
– Embedded approaches:
 Featureselection occurs naturally as part of the data mining
algorithm
– Filter approaches:
 Features are selected before data mining algorithm is run

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