Data preprocessing and preparation

Lecturer: Assoc.Prof. Nguyễn Phương Thái

VNU University of Engineering and Technology

Slide: from Assoc.Prof. Phan Xuân Hiếu, Updated: September 11, 2023

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Why data preprocessing?

Real–world databases are highly susceptible to noisy, missing, and inconsistent

data due to their typically huge size (often several gigabytes or more) and their
likely origin from multiple, heterogenous sources.
Original data are normally in raw formats, not ready for analysis and mining
models.
Low–quality data will lead to low–quality mining results.
Data have quality if they satisfy the requirements of the intended use. There are
many factors comprising data quality, including accuracy, completeness,
consistency, timeliness, believability, and interpretability.
How can the data be preprocessed in order to help improve the quality of the
data and, consequently, of the mining results? How can the data be preprocessed so
as to improve the efficiency and ease of the mining process?

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Major tasks in data preprocessing

Data cleaning:
“clean” the data by filling in missing values, smoothing noisy data, identifying or
removing outliers, and resolving inconsistencies.
Data integration:
involve smoothly merging data from multiple sources, e.g., databases, data cubes, or
files into a coherent data store such as a data warehouse.
Data reduction:
reduce data in different ways, e.g., dimensionality reduction, removing irrelevant
variables/attributes, data reduction using sampling, etc.
Data transformation:
perform data type conversion, discretization, data smoothing, data scaling and
normalization, etc.

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Major tasks in data preprocessing (cont’d)

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Cross–industry standard process for data mining

The cross–industry standard process for data mining (CRISP–DM) is a process

model that serves as the base for a data science process. It has six sequential phases:

1 Business understanding
2 Data understanding
3 Data preparation
4 Modeling
5 Evaluation
6 Deployment

Published in 1999 to standardize data mining processes across industries, it has

since become the most common methodology for data mining, analytics, and data
science projects.

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CRISP–DM process

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CRISP–DM phase 1: Business understanding

This phase focuses on understanding the objectives and requirements of the project. It
includes four tasks:
1 Determine business objectives:
thoroughly understand, from a business perspective, what the customer/company
really wants to accomplish, and then define business success criteria.
2 Assess situation:
determine resources availability, project requirements, assess risks and contingencies,
and conduct a cost–benefit analysis.
3 Determine data mining goals:
in addition to defining the business objectives, you should also define what success
looks like from a technical data mining perspective.
4 Produce project plan:
select technologies and tools and define detailed plans for each project phase.

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CRISP–DM phase 2: Data understanding

This phase drives the focus to identify, collect, and analyze the data sets that can help
you accomplish the project goals. This phase also has four tasks:
1 Collect initial data:
acquire the necessary data and (if necessary) load it into your analysis tool.
2 Describe data:
examine the data and document its surface properties like data format, number of
records, or field identities.
3 Explore data:
dig deeper into the data. Query it, visualize it, and identify relationships among the
data.
4 Verify data quality:
how clean/dirty is the data? Document any quality issues.

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CRISP–DM phase 3: Data preparation
This phase prepares the final data for modeling. It has five tasks:
1 Select data:
determine which data sets will be used and document reasons for inclusion/exclusion.
2 Clean data:
often this is the lengthiest task. Without it, you will likely fall victim to garbage-in,
garbage-out. A common practice during this task is to correct, impute, or remove
erroneous values.
3 Construct data:
derive new attributes that will be helpful. For example, derive someone’s body mass
index from height and weight fields.
4 Integrate data:
create new data sets by combining data from multiple sources.
5 Format data:
re-format data as necessary. For example, you might convert string values that store
numbers to numeric values so that you can perform mathematical operations.
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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Data cleaning

1 Handling missing values

2 Handling incorrect and inconsistent values
3 Handling noisy data

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Handling missing values

1 Ignore tuples with missing values

2 Fill in the missing values manually
3 Use a global constant to fill in the missing values
4 Use a measure of central tendency for the attribute
5 Use the attribute mean or median for all samples belonging to the same class as the
given tuple
6 Use the most probable value to fill in the missing values

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Ignore tuples with missing values

This is usually done when the class label is missing (assuming the mining task
involves classification).
This method is not very effective, unless the tuple contains several attributes with
missing values.
It is especially poor when the percentage of missing values per attribute varies
considerably.
By ignoring tuples, we do not make use of the remaining attributes’ values in the
tuples.

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Fill in the missing values manually

In general, this approach is time consuming and may not be feasible given a large
data set with many missing values.

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Use a global constant to fill in the missing values

Replace all missing attribute values by the same constant such as a label like
“Unknown” or −∞.
If missing values are replaced by, say, “Unknown” then the mining program may
mistakenly think that they form an interesting concept, since they all have a value
in common – that of “Unknown”.
Hence, although this method is simple, it is not reliable.

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Use a measure of central tendency for the attribute

Use a measure of central tendency for the attribute (e.g., the mean or median)
to fill in the missing values.
For normal (symmetric) data distributions, the mean can be used, while skewed
data distribution should employ the median.

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Class–based filling

Use the attribute mean or median for all samples belonging to the same class as
the given tuple.
For example, if classifying customers according to c r e d i t _ r i sk , we may replace the
missing value with the mean income value for customers in the same credit risk
category as that of the given tuple.
If the data distribution for a given class is skewed, the median value is a better
choice

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Use the most probable value to fill in the missing values

This may be determined with regression, inference-based tools using a Bayesian

formalism, or decision tree induction.
For example, using the other customer attributes in your data set, you may
construct a decision tree to predict the missing values for income.
This is a popular strategy. In comparison to the other methods, it uses the most
information from the present data to predict missing values. By considering the
other attributes’ values in its estimation of the missing value for income, there is a
greater chance that the relationships between income and the other attributes are
preserved.

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Missing values may not errors in data

It is important to note that, in some cases, a missing value may not imply an
error in the data!
For example, when applying for a credit card, candidates may be asked to supply
their driver’s license number. Candidates who do not have a driver’s license
may naturally leave this field blank.
Ideally, each attribute should have one or more rules regarding the null condition.
The rules may specify whether or not nulls are allowed and/or how such values
should be handled or transformed.
Fields may also be intentionally left blank if they are to be provided in a later
step of the business process. Hence, although we can try our best to clean the data
after it is seized, good database and data entry procedure design should help
minimize the number of missing values or errors in the first place.

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Handling incorrect and inconsistent values

The key methods that are used for removing or correcting the incorrect and inconsistent
entries are as follows:
Inconsistency detection
Domain knowledge
Data-centric methods

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Inconsistency detection

This is typically done when the data is available from different sources in
different formats.
For example, a person’s name may be spelled out in full in one source, whereas
the other source may only contain the initials and a last name.
In such cases, the key issues are duplicate detection and inconsistency
detection.
These topics are studied under the general umbrella of data integration within the
database field.

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Domain knowledge

A significant amount of domain knowledge is often available in terms of the ranges

of the attributes or rules that specify the relationships across different attributes.
For example, if the country field is “United States”, then the city field cannot be
“Shanghai”.
Many data scrubbing and data auditing tools have been developed that use such
domain knowledge and constraints to detect incorrect entries.

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Data–centric methods

In these cases, the statistical behavior of the data is used to detect outliers. For
example, the two isolated data points in the above figure marked as “noise” are
outliers. These isolated points might have arisen because of errors in the data
collection process.
However, this may not always be the case because the anomalies may be the
result of interesting behavior of the underlying system. Therefore, any detected
outlier may need to be manually examined before it is discarded. The use of data–
centric methods for cleaning can sometimes be dangerous because they can result
in the removal of useful knowledge from the underlying system.
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Handling noisy data

What is noise? Noise is a random error or variance in a measured variable. In the

last lecture (data understanding) we saw some techniques like five–number summary
and boxplots to identify noise or outliers. The following are some smoothing techniques
to deal with noisy data:
Binning
Regression
Outlier analysis

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Handling noisy data: binning

Binning methods smooth a sorted data value by consulting its “neighborhood,” that
is, the values around it.
The sorted values are put into a number of “buckets,” or bins.
Because binning methods consult the neighborhood of values, they perform local
smoothing.
Example (next slide): in smoothing by bin means, each value in a bin is replaced
by the mean value of the bin. For example, the mean of the values 4, 8, and 15 in
Bin 1 is 9. Therefore, each original value in this bin is replaced by the value 9.
Similarly, smoothing by bin medians can be employed, in which each bin value is
replaced by the bin median.
In smoothing by bin boundaries, the minimum and maximum values in a given
bin are identified as the bin boundaries. Each bin value is then replaced by the
closest boundary value. In general, the larger the width, the greater the effect of the
smoothing.
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Handling noisy data: binning example

Binning methods for data smoothing [1]

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Handling noisy data: regression

Data smoothing can also be done by regression, a technique that conforms data
values to a function.
Linear regression involves finding the “best” line to fit two attributes (or variables)
so that one attribute can be used to predict the other.
Multiple linear regression is an extension of linear regression, where more than two
attributes are involved and the data are fit to a multidimensional surface.

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Handling noisy data: outlier analysis

Removing noisy data (outliers) using clustering [1]

Outliers may be detected by clustering, for example, where similar values are
organized into groups, or “clusters.”
Intuitively, values that fall outside of the set of clusters may be considered outliers.
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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Data integration

Data mining often requires data integration.

Data integration:
the merging of data from multiple data sources.
Careful data integration:
→ reduce and avoid redundancies and inconsistencies.
→ improve the accuracy and speed of the subsequent data mining process.
The major tasks in data integration:
1 Entity identification problem
2 Redundancy and correlation analysis
3 Tuple or record duplication
4 Data value conflict detection and resolution

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Entity identification problem

Schema integration and object matching can be tricky.

How can equivalent real–world entities from multiple data sources be matched up?
This is referred to as the entity identification problem.

Example:
customer_id and cust_number in two databases refer to the same attribute?
Meta–data can be used for schema matching.
Meta–data of a data attribute may include:
Name of the attribute
Meaning or description of the attribute
Data type and range of values
Null rules for handling blank, zero, or null value

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Redundancy and correlation analysis

Redundancy is another important issue in data integration.

Example:
annual_revenue may be redundant if it can be “derived” from other attributes.
Inconsistent attribute naming can also cause redundancies in the resulting data.
Some redundancies can be detected by correlation analysis.
Correlation analysis can measure how strongly one attribute implies the other.
Correlation analysis for nominal/categorical data:
use the χ 2 (chi–square) test of independence (previous lecture: Data understanding).
Correlation analysis for numeric attributes:
use covariance or correlation coefficient, e.g., Pearson correlation (previous lecture).

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Tuple duplication

Duplication should also be detected at the tuple level.

e.g., where there are two or more identical tuples for a given unique data entry case.
Inconsistencies often arise between various duplicates
due to inaccurate data entry or updating some but not all data occurrences.
Example:
if a purchase order database contains attributes for the purchaser’s name and address
instead of a key to this information in a purchaser database, discrepancies can
occur, such as the same purchaser’s name appearing with different addresses
within the purchase order database.

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Data value conflict detection and resolution

Data integration also involves the detection and resolution of data value conflicts.
For example, for the same real–world entity, attribute values from different sources
may differ.
This may be due to differences in representation, scaling, or encoding. For instance,
a weight attribute may be stored in metric units in one system and British imperial
units in another. For a hotel chain, the price of rooms in different cities may involve
not only different currencies but also different services (e.g., free breakfast) and
taxes.
When exchanging information between schools, for example, each school may have
its own curriculum and grading scheme. One university may adopt a quarter system,
offer three courses on database systems, and assign grades from A+ to F, whereas
another may adopt a semester system, offer two courses on databases, and assign
grades from 1 to 10.

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Data transformation

1 Data conversion and discretization

2 Data smoothing
3 Data aggregation
4 Construction of attributes
5 Data scaling and normalization
6 Concept hierarchy generation for nominal data

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Data conversion and discretization

Numeric to categorical data: discretization

Categorical to numeric data: binarization
Text to numeric data
Time–series to discrete sequence data

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Numeric to categorical data: discretization

Discretization is the task that divides the value range of a numeric attribute into k
sub–ranges.
Then, the attribute is assumed to contain k different categorical labeled values from
1 to k, depending on the range in which the original attribute lies.
For example, consider the age attribute. One could create sub–ranges [0, 10], [11, 20],
[21, 30], and so on. The symbolic value for any record in the sub–range [11, 20] is “2”
and the symbolic value for a record in the sub–range [21, 30] is “3”. Because these
are symbolic values, no ordering is assumed between the values “2” and “3”.
Variations within a sub–range are not distinguishable after discretization. Thus, the
discretization process does lose some information for the mining process.
However, for some applications, this loss of information is not a big problem.

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Discretization challenges and techniques

One challenge with discretization is that the data may be non–uniformly distributed
across the different intervals.
For example, for the salary attribute, a large subset of the population may be
grouped in the [40,000, 80,000] sub–range, but very few will be grouped in the
[1,040,000, 1,080,000] sub–range (both sub–ranges have the same size).
Thus, the use of sub–ranges of equal size may not be very helpful in discriminating
between different data segments. Many attributes, such as age, are not as non–
uniformly distributed, and therefore ranges of equal size may work reasonably well.
The discretization process can be performed in a variety of ways depending on
application–specific goals:
Equi–width sub–ranges
Equi–log sub–ranges
Equi–depth sub–ranges
Clustering–based discretization
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Discretization: equi–width sub–ranges

In this case, each sub–range [a, b] is chosen in such a way that b− a is the same for
each sub–range.
This approach has the drawback that it will not work for data sets that are
distributed non–uniformly across the different sub–ranges.
To determine the actual values of the sub–ranges, the minimum and maximum
values of each attribute are determined. This range [min, max] is then divided into
k sub–ranges of equal length.

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Discretization: equi-log sub-ranges

Each sub–range [a, b] is chosen in such a way that log(b) − log(a) has the same
value.
This kinds of sub–range selection has the effect of geometrically increasing
sub–ranges [a, aα], [aα, aα2], [aα2, aα3], and so on, for some α > 1.
This kind of sub–range may be useful when the attribute shows an exponential
distribution across a range.
In fact, if the attribute frequency distribution for an attribute can be modeled in
functional form, then a natural approach would be to select sub–ranges [a, b] such
that f (b) − f (a) is the same for some function f (·).
The idea is to select this function f (·) in such a way that each sub–range contains
an approximately similar number of records. However, in most cases, it is hard to
find such a function f (·) in closed form.

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Example
Discretization: equi-depth sub-ranges

In this case, the sub-ranges are selected so that each sub-range has an equal
number of records.
The idea is to provide the same level of granularity to each sub-range.
An attribute can be divided into equi-depth sub-ranges by first sorting it, and then
selecting the division points on the sorted attribute value, such that each sub-range
contains an equal number of records.

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Clustering–based discretization

Cluster analysis is a popular data discretization method.

A clustering algorithm can be applied to discretize a numeric attribute, X, by
partitioning the values of X into clusters or groups.
Clustering takes the distribution of X into consideration, as well as the closeness of
data points, and therefore is able to produce high–quality discretization results.

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Categorical to numeric data: binarization
In some cases, it is desirable to use numeric data mining algorithms on categorical
data.
Because binary data is a special form of both numeric and categorical data, it is
possible to convert the categorical attributes to binary form and then use numeric
algorithms on the binarized data.
If a categorical attribute has k different values, then k different binary attributes are
created. Each binary attribute corresponds to one possible value of the categorical
attribute.
Therefore, exactly one of the k attributes takes on the value of 1, and the remaining
take on the value of 0.

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Text to numeric data
Vector space model (a.k.a. bag of words): converting documents, paragraphs,
sentences into sparse vectors. The vector dimension is the size of vocabulary of the
text collection. Weights in vectors can be binary, raw frequency, normalized
frequency, or TF–IDF.
N–gram model: this is a special case of vector space model where consecutive words
or tokens can be combine to form n–grams (uni–grams, bi–grams, tri–grams, etc.)
Latent semantic and topics models: transforming documents, paragraphs, sentences
into dense semantic/topic vectors. The dimension is much smaller, e.g., 50, 100, 200,
300. Well–known models are LSA, LDA, and various topic models.
Text embeddings: using deep representation learning models to transform texts
(words, sentences, paragraphs, documents) into embeddings (dense) vectors.
Well–known techniques are Word2Vec, GloVe, Doc2Vec, etc.
Popular libraries: NLTK, Gensim, CoreNLP, and spaCy. For Vietnamese NLP:
VLSP libraries, VnCoreNLP, PhoBERT, and many more from
https://github.com/topics/vietnamese-nlp.
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Time–series to discrete sequence data
Converting time–series data to discrete sequence using symbolic aggregate approximation
(SAX). This method comprises two steps:
Window–based averaging: the series is divided into windows of length w, and the
average time–series value over each window is computed.
Value–based discretization: the averaged time–series values are discretized into a
smaller number of equi–depth intervals.
The idea is to ensure that each symbol has an approximately equal frequency in the
time–series. This is identical to the equi–depth discretization of numeric attributes
that was discussed earlier.
The interval boundaries are constructed by assuming that the time–series values are
distributed with a Gaussian assumption. The mean and standard deviation of the
(windowed) time–series values are estimated in the data–driven manner.
The quantiles of the Gaussian distribution are used to determine the boundaries of the
intervals. This is more efficient than sorting all the data values to determine quantiles,
and it may be a more practical approach for a long time–series. The number of
intervals is normally from 3 to 10.

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Data smoothing

Smoothing, which works to remove noise from data. Techniques include binning,
regression, and clustering.
Data smoothing has been presented in the Data cleaning section (subsection:
Handling noisy data).

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Data aggregation
Aggregation, where summary or aggregation operations are applied to the data.
This step is typically used in constructing a data cube for data analysis at multiple
levels of abstraction.
Dat cube is a common concept in data warehousing that represents a
multidimensional dataset where each attribute may have a concept hierarchy. For
example, attribute Time can be at different levels of granularity like {year > quarter
> month > week > day > hour }.

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Construction of attributes

In attribute construction or feature construction, new attributes are constructed and

added to help the mining process, e.g., improving the accuracy and understanding of
structure in high–dimensional data.
For example, we may wish to add the attribute area based on the attributes height
and width.
New attributes can also help data miners and analysts to explore, observe, and
understand the data more easily.

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Data scaling and normalization

In many cases, the different features represent different scales of reference and may
therefore not be comparable to one another.
For example, an attribute such as age is drawn on a very different scale than an
attribute such as salary. The latter attribute is typically orders of magnitude larger
than the former. As a result, any aggregate function computed on the different
features (e.g., Euclidean distances) will be dominated by the attribute of larger
magnitude.
To address this problem, values of attributes are usually re–scaled or normalized to
a more suitable range.
There are two main standardization techniques:
Min-max normalization
Standard score normalization
Decimal scaling

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Min–max normalization
Let D = {x 1 , x2, . . . , x n } be a univariate data sample consisting of n
observations/values drawn from a variable/attribute X. In min–max normalization,
each value is scaled as follows:

(1)

where:
minX and maxX are the minimum and the maximum values in D (i.e., before
normalization), respectively.
minnew
X and maxnewX are the minimum and the maximum values of the data attribute
after being normalized, respectively.

After transformation, all the new values x ′i (i = 1..n) is in [minnew new

X , max X ].
new new
Normally, min X = 0 and max X = 1 and the new range is [0, 1] .
Min–max normalization is also called range normalization. This normalization
technique can also be applied to any numeric data attributes in bivariate and
multivariate data.
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Standard score normalization

Let D = {x 1 , x2, . . . , x n } be a univariate data sample consisting of n

observations/values drawn from a variable/attribute X. In standard score
normalization, also called z–normalization, each value is replaced by its z-score as
follows:

(2)

where:
µ̂ is the sample mean.
σ̂ is the sample standard deviation.
After transformation, the new attribute has mean µ̂ ′ = 0, and standard deviation
σ̂ ′ = 1.
The vast majority of the normalized values will typically lie in the range [−3, 3]
under the normal distribution assumption.

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Decimal scaling

Normalization by decimal scaling normalizes by moving the decimal point of values

of a numeric attribute X.
The number of decimal points moved depends on the maximum absolute value of X.

A value, x i , of X is normalized to x ′i by computing:

(3)

where j is the smallest integer such that max(|x ′i|) < 1.

Example: suppose that the recorded values of X range from 986 to 917. The
maximum absolute value of X is 986. To normalize by decimal scaling, we therefore
divide each value by 1000 (i.e., j = 3) so that 986 normalizes to 0.986 and 917
normalizes to 0.917.

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Bivariate data sample

Let D be a bivariate data sample consisting of 10 observations/points drawn from two

variables/attributes: Age (X1) and Income (X2) [4].

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Min–max normalization example

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Standard score normalization example

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Distance between points before and after normalization

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Concept hierarchy generation for nominal data
Concept hierarchy generation for nominal data, where attributes such as street can be
generalized to higher–level concepts, like city or country. Many hierarchies for nominal
attributes are implicit within the database schema and can be automatically defined at
the schema definition level.

Example of concept hierarchy [1]

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Overview of data reduction

Data reduction techniques can be applied to obtain a reduced representation of the

data set that is much smaller in volume, yet closely maintains the integrity of the
original data.
Mining on the reduced data set should be more efficient yet produce the same (or
almost the same) analytical results.
Dimensionality reduction is the process of reducing the number of random
variables or attributes under consideration. Dimensionality reduction methods
include wavelet transforms and principal component analysis, which transform the
original data onto a smaller space. Attribute subset selection identifies and remove
irrelevant, weakly relevant, or redundant attributes.
Numerosity reduction techniques replace the original data volume by alternative,
smaller forms of data representation. Techniques are both parametric methods
(regression, log–linear models) and nonparametric methods (histograms, clustering,
sampling, data cube aggregation).

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Data reduction methods

1 Principal component analysis (PCA)

2 Attribute subset selection
3 Histograms
4 Clustering
5 Data sampling
6 Data cube aggregation

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Principal component analysis (PCA)

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a method of dimensionality reduction.

Suppose that the data to be reduced consist of m tuples or data vectors described
by n attributes or dimensions.
PCA searches for k n–dimensional orthogonal vectors that can best be used to
represent the data, where k ≤ n. The original data are thus projected onto a much
smaller space, resulting in dimensionality reduction.
PCA “combines” the essence of attributes by creating an alternative, smaller set of
variables. The initial data can then be projected onto this smaller set.
PCA often reveals relationships that were not previously suspected and thereby
allows interpretations that would not ordinarily result.

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Steps of PCA

PCA: Y1 and Y2 are the first two principal components for the given data. [1]

The steps of PCA are as follows:

1 The input data are normalized, so that each attribute falls within the same range.
This step helps ensure that attributes with large domains will not dominate
attributes with smaller domains.
2 PCA computes k orthonormal vectors that provide a basis for the normalized input
data. These are unit vectors that each point in a direction perpendicular to the
others. These vectors are referred to as the principal components. The input data
are a linear combination of the principal components.
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Steps of PCA (cont’d)

3 The principal components are sorted in order of decreasing “significance” or

strength. The principal components essentially serve as a new set of axes for the
data, providing important information about variance. That is, the sorted axes are
such that the first axis shows the most variance among the data, the second axis
shows the next highest variance, and so on. For example, the previous figure shows
the first two principal components, Y1 and Y2, for the given set of data originally
mapped to the axes X 1 and X 2 . This information helps identify groups or patterns
within the data.
4 Because the components are sorted in decreasing order of “significance,” the data
size can be reduced by eliminating the weaker components, that is, those with low
variance. Using the strongest principal components, it should be possible to
reconstruct a good approximation of the original data.
PCA can handle sparse data and skewed data. Multidimensional data can be handled by
reducing to two dimensions. Principal components may be used as inputs to regression
and cluster analysis.
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Attribute subset selection

Data sets for analysis may contain hundreds of attributes, many of which may be
irrelevant to the mining task or redundant.
For example, if the task is to classify customers based on whether or not they are
likely to purchase a popular new CD at Al l El ectronics when notified of a sale,
attributes such as the customer’s telephone_number are likely to be irrelevant,
unlike attributes such as age or music_taste.
Although it may be possible for a domain expert to pick out some of the useful
attributes, this can be a difficult and time–consuming task, especially when the
data’s behavior is not well known.
Leaving out relevant attributes or keeping irrelevant attributes may be detrimental,
causing confusion for the mining algorithm employed. This can result in discovered
patterns of poor quality.
In addition, the added volume of irrelevant or redundant attributes can slow down
the mining process.
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Attribute subset selection (cont’d)

Attribute subset selection reduces the data set size by removing irrelevant or
redundant attributes (or dimensions).
The goal of attribute subset selection is to find a minimum set of attributes such
that the resulting probability distribution of the data classes is as close as possible
to the original distribution obtained using all attributes.
Mining on a reduced set of attributes has an additional benefit: It reduces the
number of attributes appearing in the discovered patterns, helping to make the
patterns easier to understand.

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How to find a “good” subset of the original attributes?

Greedy (heuristic) methods for attribute subset selection. [1]

For n attributes, there are 2n possible subsets. An exhaustive searchfor the optimal
subset can be prohibitively expensive. Greedy approach is normally used.
The “best” (and “worst”) attributes are typically determined using statistical tests.
Many other attributes need an another measure like information gain (used in
decision trees).
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Attribute subset selection methods

1 Stepwise forward selection: the procedure starts with an empty reduced set of
attributes. The best of the original attributes is determined and added to the
reduced set, and similarly for the second, third steps, etc.
2 Stepwise backward elimination: the procedure starts with the full set of
attributes. At each step, it removes the worst attribute remaining in the set.
3 Combination of forward selection and backward elimination: the stepwise
forward selection and backward elimination methods can be combined in each step.
4 Decision tree induction: decision tree algorithms (e.g., ID3, C4.5, and CART)
were originally intended for classification. All attributes that appear in the tree are
assumed to be relevant.
The stopping criteria for the methods may vary. The procedure may employ a threshold
on the measure used to determine when to stop the attribute selection process.

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Histograms
Histograms use binning to approximate data distributions and are a popular form of
data reduction.
A histogram for an attribute, X, partitions the data distribution of X into disjoint
subsets, referred to as buckets or bins.
If each bucket represents only a single attribute–value/frequency pair, the buckets
are called singleton buckets. Often, buckets instead represent continuous ranges for
the given attribute.
How are the buckets determined and the attribute values partitioned? There are
several partitioning ways:
Equal–width: in an equal–width histogram, the width of each bucket range is
uniform.
Equal–frequency (or equal–depth): in an equal–frequency histogram, each bucket
contains roughly the same number of contiguous data samples.
Histograms are highly effective at approximating both sparse and dense data, as well
as highly skewed and uniform data. The histograms can be extended for multiple
attributes.
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Example of histograms

The following data are a list of Al l El ectronics prices for commonly sold items [1]. The
numbers have been sorted: {1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10, 12, 14, 14, 14, 15, 15,
15, 15, 15, 15, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 21, 21, 21, 21, 25,
25, 25, 25, 25, 28, 28, 30, 30, 30}.

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Clustering

Clustering techniques partition data objects into groups, or clusters, so that objects
within a cluster are “similar” to one another and “dissimilar” to objects in other
clusters.
Similarity is commonly defined in terms of how “close” the objects are in space,
based on a distance function.
In data reduction, the cluster representations of the data are used to replace the
actual data. The effectiveness of this technique depends on the data’s nature. It is
much more effective for data that can be organized into distinct clusters than for
smeared data.
Different clustering approaches and techniques will be given later in lecture Data
clustering.

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Data sampling
Data sampling can be used as a data reduction method because it allows a large data set
to be represented by a much smaller random/non–random data sample (a subset). There
are different sampling techniques and they are classified into two main types:
Random sampling:
Simple random sampling (with and without replacement)
Stratified sampling
Cluster sampling
Systematic sampling
Multi–stage sampling
Non–random sampling:
Convenience sampling
Judgement sampling
Quota sampling
Snowball sampling
Sampling techniques will be presented in details in the next section.
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Data cube aggregation
Dat cube is a common concept in data warehousing. A data cube represents a
multidimensional dataset where each attribute may have a concept hierarchy. For
example, attribute Time can be at different levels of granularity like {year > quarter
> month > week > day > hour}.
Drill–down allows to view data in more details while roll–up allows to view data
in more general/summary.

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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Data sampling

Data sampling is the process of selecting a subset of data observations (data objects
elements, instances, points), called a data sample, from a large population of data.
The resulting data sample normally consists of data points that are good
representatives of the population, reflecting the nature and characteristics of the
population properly.
Data sampling is critical because most of data analysis tasks will be performed on a
data sample rather than on the whole population.
Data sampling can be seen as a data reduction technique because it allows a large
data set to be represented by a much smaller (random/non–random) data sample.
Data sampling techniques are classified into two main types:
1 Random sampling
2 Non–random sampling

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Data sampling (cont’d)

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Random sampling methods

In random sapling, every data element in the population has a chance to be chosen via a
random selection process. Popular random sampling techniques are as follows:
1 Simple random sampling
2 Stratified sampling
3 Cluster sampling
4 Systematic sampling
5 Multi–stage sampling

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Simple random sampling

A simple random sample is a subset of a statistical population in which each

member of the subset has an equal probability of being chosen. It means that there
is no bias when sampling.
A simple random sample takes a small, random portion of the entire population to
represent the entire data;
Simple random sampling can be done using methods like lotteries or random draws;
This sampling technique is often used when we have little or no information about the
population.
Simple random sampling can be without replacement or with replacement.
Example:
Select randomly 30 employees from all 100 employees of a company (without
replacement).
Select randomly 10000 documents from a collection of 100000 text documents (with
replacement).

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Bootstrap resampling

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Stratified sampling

In this technique, the data elements are first divided into different groups or strata.
Elements in each group/stratum are similar in some way, and different from the
elements in other strata.
After division, the simple random sampling will be applied for each group/stratum
to choose random elements into the final data sample.
With this technique, we need an understanding of the population in order to divide
the elements into strata.
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Stratified sampling example

The previous example: select randomly 30 employees from all 100 employees of a
company.
Now we have constraint that half of 30 selected employees are female. The simple
random sampling will not always meet this constraint.
Supposing that, in 100 employees of the company, there are 25 female. Then, we
apply stratified random sampling by dividing the 100 employees into two
groups/strata: 75 male and 25 female.
Then, we apply the simple random sampling for each group. For each group, we
randomly select only 15 employees. The final data sample consists of 30 employees
and half of them are female.
This sampling technique is usually applied when we have some constraints for the
resulting data sample and the population distribution is skewed.

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Cluster sampling

Step 1: define the population.

Step 2: divide data elements in the population into clusters.
Each cluster should be as diverse as possible; every characteristic of the entire
population to be represented in each cluster.
Each cluster should have a similar distribution of characteristics as the distribution of
the population as a whole.
Taken together, the clusters should cover the entire population; and no overlapping.

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Cluster sampling (cont’d)

Step 3: randomly select clusters to use as your sample.

If each cluster is itself a mini-representation of the larger population, randomly
selecting and sampling from the clusters allows you to imitate simple random
sampling, which in turn supports the validity of your results.
Conversely, if the clusters are not representative, then random sampling will allow you
to gather data on a diverse array of clusters, which should still provide you with an
overview of the population as a whole.

Step 4: collect all the data elements in each selected clusters to form the resulting
data sample.

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Multi–stage cluster sampling

In multistage cluster sampling, rather than collect data from every single element in
the selected clusters, we randomly select individual elements from within the cluster
to form the final data sample. This is called double–stage cluster sampling.
We can also continue this procedure, taking progressively smaller and smaller
random samples, which is usually called multi–stage cluster sampling.

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Cluster sampling: advantages and disadvantages

Advantages:
Cluster sampling is time– and cost–efficient, especially for samples that are widely
geographically spread and would be difficult to properly sample otherwise.
Because cluster sampling uses randomization, if the population is clustered properly,
your study will have high external validity because your sample will reflect the
characteristics of the larger population.
Disadvantages:
Internal validity is less strong than with simple random sampling, particularly as you
use more stages of clustering.
If your clusters are not a good mini–representation of the population as a whole, then
it is more difficult to rely upon your sample to provide valid results.
Cluster sampling is much more complex to plan than other forms of sampling.

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Systematic sampling

In this technique, only the first element is selected randomly. From the second, the
selection is based on the previous one.
First, all the elements in the population are placed in a sequence in random order.
Suppose the population size is N and the size of the resulting sample is n (normally
n ≪ N ). Then divide the population sequence into n sub-sequences with length
k = ⌊ Nn⌋ (except the length of the last sub-sequence may be greater than k).
The sampling starting by randomly selecting the first element from the first
sub-sequence, say at the position/index i1. Then, the position of the second element
is i2 = i1 + k, the third element is at i3 = i2 + k = i1 + 2k. Similarly, in = i n−1 +
k = i1 + (n − 1)k.
For example, with N = 22, n = 5, then k = ⌊ 22 5 ⌋ = 4 (the last sub-sequence has
length of 6). Suppose the first element is selected at i1 = 2, then the indexes of all
the other elements of the sample are 6, 10, 14, and 18.

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Systematic sampling example

The above figure shows an example of systematic sampling with:

N = 12
n= 4
k= 3
The first element is randomly selected at position 2, the subsequent selections are at
5, 8, and 11 (with step k = 3).

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Multi–stage sampling

Multi–stage sampling is often considered an extended version of cluster sampling.

In multi–stage sampling, we divide the population into clusters and select some
clusters at the first stage. At each subsequent stage, you further divide up those
selected clusters into smaller clusters, and repeat the process until you get to the
last step. At the last step, you only select some members of each cluster for your
sample.
Like in single–stage sampling, we start by defining the target population. But in
multi–stage sampling, we do not need a sampling frame that lists every member of
the population. That is why this method is useful for collecting data from large,
dispersed populations.

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Multi–stage sampling example
In order to evaluate the knowledge of high–school students national-wide and
independent with the national high–school graduation examination, The Ministry of
Education and Training (MOET) want to organize an interview with 10,000
students from different regions of the country.
MOET could not interview students from all high schools from all
districts/cities/provinces due to the time, human resource, and cost constraints.
MOET will perform a multi–stage sampling as follows:
Step 1: all provinces and cities are put into different clusters based on the
geographical regions. Clusters are Northwest, Northeast, Red River Delta, North
Central Coast, South Central Coast, Central Highlands, Southeast, and Mekong
River Delta. From each region, several provinces and cities will be selected
randomly. For example:
Son La, Lai Chau, Ha Giang from Northwest
Hanoi, Hai Duong from Red River Delta
...
Bac Lieu, Can Tho, Tra Vinh from Mekong River Delta
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Multi–stage sampling example (cont’d)

Step 2: All high schools from the selected provinces/cities above will be classified
into different sub–clusters like region Khu vuc 1 (KV1), Khu vuc 2 (KV2), Khu vuc
2 nong thon (KV2-NT), and Khu vuc 3 (KV3). From each of these clusters, MOET
randomly selects 25 high schools and the to get a final total 100 high schools. These
100 high schools represent for all geographical regions and they can be at the city,
town, country side, or mountainous areas.
Step 3: From each of 100 selected high schools, select 100 12th–grade students in
order to form the resulting data sample with 10,000 students.
The final data sample of 10,000 students are very diverse, including students from
different regions of the country. They can live at city, town, country side, or they
can be ethnic minority. This is obviously a suitable sample for MOET to evaluate
the high–school education quality. In reality, MOET can even perform a more
complicated sampling to meet other constraints that they may have.

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Non–random sampling methods

Non–random sampling (or non–probability sampling) is a sampling approach where the

selection of elements from a population is not based on the randomness. Rather, the
selection is based on the human understanding of the population. The resulting data
sample, therefore, can be biased. Here are some well–known non–random sampling
techniques:
1 Convenience sampling
2 Judgement sampling
3 Quota sampling
4 Snowball sampling

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Convenience sampling

Convenience sampling is defined as a method adopted by researchers where they

collect market research data from a conveniently available pool of respondents.
It is commonly used sampling technique as it is incredibly prompt, uncomplicated,
and economical. In many cases, members are readily approachable to be a part of
the sample.
In most cases, testing the entire community is practically impossible because they
are not easy to reach. Researchers also use convenience sampling in situations where
additional inputs are not necessary. There are no criteria required to be a part of
this sample. Thus, it becomes incredibly simplified to include elements in this
sample. All components of the population are eligible and dependent on the
researcher’s proximity to get involved in the sample.
The researcher chooses members merely based on proximity and doesn’t consider
whether they represent the entire population or not. Using this technique, they can
observe habits, opinions, and viewpoints in the easiest possible manner.

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Applications of convenience sampling

Convenience sampling is applied by brands and organizations to measure their

perception of their image in the market. Data is collected from potential customers
to understand specific issues or manage opinions of a newly launched product.
A basic example of a convenience sampling method is when companies distribute
their promotional pamphlets and ask questions at a mall or on a crowded street with
randomly selected participants.
There is always a chance that the randomly selected population may not accurately
represent the population of interest, thus increasing the chances of bias.

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Advantages of convenience sampling

Collect data quickly: in situations where time is a constraint, many researchers

choose this method for quick data collection. The rules to gather elements for the
sample are least complicated in comparison to techniques such as simple random
sampling, stratified sampling, and systematic sampling.
Inexpensive to create samples: the money and time invested in other probability
sampling methods are quite large compared to convenience sampling.
Easy to do research: the name of this surveying technique clarifies how samples are
formed.
Low cost: low cost is one of the main reasons why researchers adopt this technique.
Readily available sample: Data collection is easy and accessible. Most convenience
sampling considers the population at hand.
Fewer rules to follow: tt does not require going through a checklist to filter members
of an audience.

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Judgement sampling
Judgmental sampling, also called purposive sampling or authoritative sampling, is a
non–probability sampling technique in which the sample members are chosen only
on the basis of the researcher’s knowledge and judgment.
As the researcher’s knowledge is instrumental in creating a sample in this technique,
there are chances that the results will be highly accurate with a minimum margin of
error.
The process of selecting a sample involves the researchers carefully picking and
choosing each individual to be a part of the sample. The researcher’s knowledge is
primary in this sampling process as the members of the sample are not randomly
chosen.
Judgmental sampling is most effective in situations where there are only a restricted
number of people in a population who own qualities that a researcher expects from
the target population.
Judgmental sampling is usually used in situations where the target population
comprises of highly intellectual individuals who cannot be chosen by using any other
probability or non–probability sampling technique.
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Advantages of judgement sampling

Consumes minimum time for execution: in this sampling approach, researcher

expertise is important and there are no other barriers involved due to which
selecting a sample becomes extremely convenient.
Allows researchers to approach their target market directly: there are no criteria
involved in selecting a sample except for the researcher’s preferences. Due to this,
he/she can communicate directly with the target audience of their choice and
produce desired results.
Almost real–time results: A quick poll or survey can be conducted with the sample
using judgmental sampling since the members of the sample will possess appropriate
knowledge and understanding of the subject.

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Quota sampling

In this technique, the population is divided into exclusive sub–groups according to

particular criteria. This partitioning can be done at different levels if needed.
Then, the sampling will be performed for each sub–group using convenience or
judgement sampling. And for each sub–group, the selection will have a particular
quota.
For example, the local government want to get feedback from 200 people including
50 old people, 100 employees, and 50 housewives. Then, the local people will be
classified into three sub–groups, and then apply convenience or judgement sampling
to select desired people with the above quota.

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Snowball sampling

This technique is usually used when we have little information or find it difficult to
approach elements in the population.
Then, if we find the first appropriate element, we will ask that element (normally a
person) to introduce more appropriate elements in the population that we did not
know or could not approach them directly.
In this way, the sample will be expanded quickly like a snowball.
For example, if we need to interview a group of LGBT people, but we do not know
who they are. We can find the first person to interview and politely ask him/her to
introduce other LGBT people in his/her community. Therefore, this technique is
also called referral sampling.

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Outline

1 Introduction

2 Data cleaning

3 Data integration

4 Data transformation

5 Data reduction

6 Data sampling

7 References and Summary

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References

1 J. Han, M. Kamber, and J. Pei. Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques. Morgan
Kaufmann, Elsevier, 2012 [Book1].
2 C. Aggarwal. Data Mining: The Textbook. Springer, 2015 [Book2].
3 J. Leskovec, A. Rajaraman, and J. D. Ullman. Mining of Massive Datasets.
Cambridge University Press, 2014 [Book3].
4 M. J. Zaki and W. M. Jr. Data Mining and Analysis: Fundamental Concepts and
Algorithms. Cambridge University Press, 2013 [Book4].
5 D. Easley and J. Kleinberg. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a
Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, 2010 [Book5].
6 J. VanderPlas. Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with
Data. O’Reilly, 2017 [Book6].
7 J. Grus. Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python. O’Reilly, 2015
[Book7].

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Summary

Explaining why data preprocessing and preparation is important in data analysis

and mining; as well as major tasks in data preprocessing like data cleaning, data
integration, data transformation, data reduction, etc.
Data cleaning techniques to handle missing values, incorrect and inconsistent values,
as well as deal with noisy data.
Introducing several concepts in data integration such as entity identification,
redundancy and correlation analysis, data tuple duplication, etc.
Important concepts and techniques in data transformation with data conversion,
data discretization, data smoothing, data aggregation, data scaling and
normalization, etc.
Important concepts and techniques in data reduction such as PCA, attribute subset
selection, histograms, clustering, data cube aggregation, as well as various random
and non–random data sampling methods.

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