Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

— Chapter 2 —

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 1

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Descriptive data summarization
 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Summary
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 2
 Why Data Preprocessing?
 Data in the real world is dirty
 incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking

certain attributes of interest, or containing

only aggregate data
 e.g., occupation=“ ”
 noisy: containing errors or outliers
 e.g., Salary=“-10”
 inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes
or names
 e.g., Age=“42” Birthday=“03/07/1997”
 e.g., Was rating “1,2,3”, now rating “A, B, C”
 e.g., discrepancy between duplicate records
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 3
 Why Is Data Dirty?
 Incomplete data may come from
 “Not applicable” data value when collected
 Different considerations between the time when the data was
collected and when it is analyzed.
 Human/hardware/software problems
 Noisy data (incorrect values) may come from
 Faulty data collection instruments
 Human or computer error at data entry
 Errors in data transmission
 Inconsistent data may come from
 Different data sources
 Functional dependency violation (e.g., modify some linked data)
 Duplicate records also need data cleaning
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 4
 Why Is Data Preprocessing Important?

 No quality data, no quality mining results!

 Quality decisions must be based on quality data
 e.g., duplicate or missing data may cause incorrect or even
misleading statistics.
 Data warehouse needs consistent integration of quality
data
 Data extraction, cleaning, and transformation comprises
the majority of the work of building a data warehouse
 Loading and than analysing
 ETL

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 5

 Before we load the data into ware
house – ETL

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 6

 Multi-Dimensional Measure of Data Quality

 A well-accepted multidimensional view:

 Accuracy

 Completeness

 Consistency

 Timeliness

 Believability

 Value added

 Interpretability

 Accessibility

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 7

 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data cleaning
 Fill in missing values, smooth noisy data, identify or remove
outliers, and resolve inconsistencies
 Data integration
 Integration of multiple databases, data cubes, or files
 Data transformation
 Normalization and aggregation
 Data reduction
 Obtains reduced representation in volume but produces the same
or similar analytical results
 Data discretization
 Part of data reduction but with particular importance, especially
for numerical data( A, A10,A12)

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 8

 Forms of Data Preprocessing

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 9

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Descriptive data summarization
 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Summary
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 10
 Descriptive data summarization

 Data Characteristics
 Central tendency and
 Dispersion of the data
 Descriptive statistics are of great help in
understanding the distribution of the
data

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 11

 Measuring the Central Tendency


1 n x
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population): x   xi
n i 1 N
n
 Weighted arithmetic mean: w x i i
x i 1
 Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values n

w
i 1
i

 Median: A holistic measure

 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of the middle two
values otherwise
 Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data): n / 2  ( f )l
median  L1  ( )c
 Mode f median
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula: mean  mode  3  (mean  median)
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 12
 Symmetric vs. Skewed Data

 Median, mean and mode of symmetric,

positively and negatively skewed data

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 13

 Measuring the Dispersion of Data
 Range, Quartiles, outliers and boxplots
 Range : The range of the set is the difference between the largest

(max()) and smallest (min()) values.

 kth percentile of a set of data in numerical order is the value xi

having the property that k percent of the data entries lie at or

below xi.
 Quartiles: Q1 (25th percentile), Q3 (75th percentile)
 Inter-quartile range: IQR = Q3 – Q1
 Five number summary: min, Q1, M, Q3, max
 Boxplot: ends of the box are the quartiles, median is marked,
whiskers, and plot outlier individually
 Outlier: usually, a value higher/lower than 1.5 x IQR

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 14

 Measuring the Dispersion of Data

Variance and standard deviation

Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)
1 n
1 n

  xi   2
2 2 2
  ( xi   ) 
N i 1 N i 1

Standard deviation σ is the square root of

variance σ2
 Boxplot Analysis

 Five-number summary of a distribution:

Minimum, Q1, M, Q3, Maximum
 Boxplot
 Data is represented with a box
 The ends of the box are at the first and third
quartiles, i.e., the height of the box is IQR
 The median is marked by a line within the box
 Whiskers: two lines outside the box extend to
Minimum and Maximum

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 16

 Data Cleaning
 Importance
 “Data cleaning is one of the three biggest problems

in data warehousing”—Ralph Kimball

 “Data cleaning is the number one problem in data

warehousing”—DCI survey
 Data cleaning tasks
 Fill in missing values
 Identify outliers and smooth out noisy data
 Correct inconsistent data
 Resolve redundancy caused by data integration
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 17
 Missing Data

 Data is not always available

 E.g., many tuples have no recorded value for several
attributes, such as customer income in sales data
 Missing data may be due to
 equipment malfunction
 inconsistent with other recorded data and thus deleted
 data not entered due to misunderstanding
 certain data may not be considered important at the time of
entry
 not register history or changes of the data
 Missing data may need to be inferred.

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 18

 How to Handle Missing Data?
 Ignore the tuple: usually done when class label is missing (assuming
the tasks in classification—not effective when the percentage of
missing values per attribute varies considerably.
 Fill in the missing value manually: tedious + infeasible?
 Fill in it automatically with
 a global constant : e.g., “unknown”, a new class?!
 the attribute mean
 the attribute mean for all samples belonging to the same class:
smarter
 the most probable value: inference-based such as Bayesian formula
or decision tree

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 19

 Noisy Data
 Noise: random error or variance in a measured variable
 Incorrect attribute values may due to
 faulty data collection instruments

 data entry problems

 data transmission problems

 technology limitation

 inconsistency in naming convention

 Other data problems which requires data cleaning

 duplicate records

 incomplete data

 inconsistent data

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 20

 How to Handle Noisy Data?
 Binning
 first sort data and partition into (equal-frequency) bins

 then one can smooth by bin means, smooth by bin

median, smooth by bin boundaries, etc.

 Regression
 smooth by fitting the data into regression functions

 Clustering
 detect and remove outliers

 Combined computer and human inspection

 detect suspicious values and check by human (e.g.,

deal with possible outliers)

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 21

 Binning Methods for Data Smoothing
 Sorted data for price (in dollars): 4, 8, 9, 15, 21, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28,
29, 34
* Partition into equal-frequency (equi-depth) bins:
- Bin 1: 4, 8, 9, 15
- Bin 2: 21, 21, 24, 25
- Bin 3: 26, 28, 29, 34
* Smoothing by bin means:
- Bin 1: 9, 9, 9, 9
- Bin 2: 23, 23, 23, 23
- Bin 3: 29, 29, 29, 29
* Smoothing by bin boundaries:
- Bin 1: 4, 4, 4, 15
- Bin 2: 21, 21, 25, 25
- Bin 3: 26, 26, 26, 34
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 22
 Regression

Y1

Y1’ y=x+1

X1 x

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 23

 Cluster Analysis

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 24

 Data Cleaning as a Process
 Data discrepancy detection
 Use metadata (e.g., domain, range, dependency, distribution)

 Check field overloading

 Check uniqueness rule, consecutive rule and null rule

 Use commercial tools

 Data scrubbing: use simple domain knowledge (e.g., postal

code, spell-check) to detect errors and make corrections

 Data auditing: by analyzing data to discover rules and

relationship to detect violators (e.g., correlation and clustering

to find outliers)
 Data migration and integration
 Data migration tools: allow transformations to be specified

 ETL (Extraction/Transformation/Loading) tools: allow users to

specify transformations through a graphical user interface

 Integration of the two processes
 Iterative and interactive (e.g., Potter’s Wheels)

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 25

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Summary

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 26

 Data Integration
 Data integration:
 Combines data from multiple sources into a coherent

store
 Schema integration: e.g., A.cust-id  B.cust-#
 Integrate metadata from different sources

 Entity identification problem:

 Identify real world entities from multiple data sources,

e.g., Bill Clinton = William Clinton

 Detecting and resolving data value conflicts
 For the same real world entity, attribute values from

different sources are different

 Possible reasons: different representations, different

scales, e.g., metric vs. British units

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 27

 Handling Redundancy in Data Integration

 Redundant data occur often when integration of multiple

databases
 Object identification: The same attribute or object
may have different names in different databases
 Derivable data: One attribute may be a “derived”
attribute in another table, e.g., annual revenue
 Redundant attributes may be able to be detected by
correlation analysis
 Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may
help reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and
improve mining speed and quality

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 28

 Correlation Analysis (Numerical Data)

 Correlation coefficient (also called Pearson’s product

moment coefficient)

rA, B 
 ( A  A)( B  B )  ( AB)  n A B

(n  1)AB (n  1)AB

where n is the number of tuples, A and B are the respective

means of A and B, σA and σB are the respective standard deviation
of A and B, and Σ(AB) is the sum of the AB cross-product.
 If rA,B > 0, A and B are positively correlated (A’s values
increase as B’s). The higher, the stronger correlation.
 rA,B = 0: independent; rA,B < 0: negatively correlated
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 29
 Correlation Analysis (Categorical Data)

 Χ2 (chi-square) test

 The larger the Χ2 value, the more likely the variables are
related
 The cells that contribute the most to the Χ2 value are
those whose actual count is very different from the
expected count

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 30

 Chi-Square Calculation: An Example

 Χ2 (chi-square) calculation (numbers in parenthesis are

expected counts calculated based on the data distribution
in the two categories)
2 2 2 2
( 250  90 ) (50  210) ( 200  360) (1000  840)
2      507.93
90 210 360 840
 It shows that gender and preferred-reading are
independent
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 31
 Example

Gender Preferred -
reading
Male fiction

Female Non-fiction
Male Non-fiction
Female Fiction
Male Fiction
Male Non-fiction
Female Fiction
Male Fiction
Male Non- fiction

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 32

 Data Transformation

 Smoothing: remove noise from data

 Aggregation: summarization, data cube construction
 Generalization: concept hierarchy climbing
 Normalization: scaled to fall within a small, specified
range
 min-max normalization
 z-score normalization
 normalization by decimal scaling
 Attribute/feature construction
 New attributes constructed from the given ones

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 33

 Data Transformation: 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 [0.0,
73,600  12,000
1.0]. Then $73,000 is mapped to 98,000  12,000 (1.0  0)  0  0.716
 Z-score normalization (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation):
v  A
v' 
 A

73,600  54,000
 1.225
 Ex. Let μ = 54,000, σ = 16,000. Then 16,000
 Normalization by decimal scaling
v
v'  j Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1
10
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 34
 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Summary

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 35

 Data Reduction Strategies

 Why data reduction?

 A database/data warehouse may store terabytes of data

 Complex data analysis/mining may take a very long time to run on

the complete data set

 Data reduction
 Obtain a reduced representation of the data set that is much

smaller in volume but yet produce the same (or almost the same)
analytical results
 Data reduction strategies
 Data cube aggregation:

 Attribute subset Selection

 Dimensionality reduction — e.g., remove unimportant attributes

 Data Compression

 Numerosity reduction — e.g., fit data into models

 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 36

 Data Cube Aggregation

 The lowest level of a data cube (base cuboid)

 The aggregated data for an individual entity of interest
 E.g., a customer in a phone calling data warehouse
 Multiple levels of aggregation in data cubes
 Further reduce the size of data to deal with
 Reference appropriate levels
 Use the smallest representation which is enough to
solve the task
 Queries regarding aggregated information should be
answered using data cube, when possible
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 37
 Data Cube Aggregation

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 38

 Attribute Subset Selection
 Feature selection (i.e., attribute subset selection):
 Select a minimum set of features such that the

probability distribution of different classes given the

values for those features is as close as possible to the
original distribution given the values of all features
 reduce # of patterns in the patterns, easier to

understand
 Heuristic methods (due to exponential # of choices):
 Step-wise forward selection

 Step-wise backward elimination

 Combining forward selection and backward elimination

 Decision-tree induction

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 39

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 40
 Dimensionality Reduction

Data encoding or transformations are applied so as to

obtain a reduced or “compressed” representation of the
original data.

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 41

 Dimensionality Reduction
Data Compression

Original Data Compressed

Data
lossless

ss y
lo
Original Data
Approximated

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 42

 Dimensionality Reduction:
Wavelet Transformation

 Discrete wavelet transform (DWT): linear signal processing,

multi-resolutional analysis
 Compressed approximation: store only a small fraction of
the strongest of the wavelet coefficients
 Similar to discrete Fourier transform (DFT), but better lossy
compression, localized in space
 Method:
 Length, L, must be an integer power of 2 (padding with 0’s, when
necessary)
 Each transform has 2 functions: smoothing, difference
 Applies to pairs of data, resulting in two set of data of length L/2
 Applies two functions recursively, until reaches the desired length

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 43

 Dimensionality Reduction: Principal
Component Analysis (PCA)
 Given N data vectors from n-dimensions, find k ≤ n orthogonal
vectors (principal components) that can be best used to represent data
 Steps
 Normalize input data: Each attribute falls within the same range

 Compute k orthonormal (unit) vectors, i.e., principal components

 Each input data (vector) is a linear combination of the k principal

component vectors
 The principal components are sorted in order of decreasing

“significance” or strength
 Since the components are sorted, the size of the data can be

reduced by eliminating the weak components, i.e., those with low

variance. (i.e., using the strongest principal components, it is
possible to reconstruct a good approximation of the original data
 Works for numeric data only
 Used when the number of dimensions is large
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 44
 Principal Component Analysis

X2

Y1
Y2

X1

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 45

 Numerosity Reduction
 Reduce data volume by choosing alternative, smaller
forms of data representation
 Parametric methods
 Assume the data fits some model, estimate model

parameters, store only the parameters, and discard

the data (except possible outliers)
 Example: Linear or multi-linear regression and Log-

linear models
 Non-parametric methods
 Do not assume models

 Major families: histograms, clustering, sampling

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 46

 Data Reduction Method (1):
Regression

 Linear regression: Data are modeled to fit a straight line

 Often uses the least-square method to fit the line
 Multiple regression: allows a response variable Y to be
modeled as a linear function of multidimensional feature
vector

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 47

 Regress Analysis

 Linear regression: Y = w X + b
 Two regression coefficients, w and b, specify the line

and are to be estimated by using the data at hand

 Using the least squares criterion to the known values

of Y1, Y2, …, X1, X2, ….

 Multiple regression: Y = b0 + b1 X1 + b2 X2.
 Many nonlinear functions can be transformed into the

above
 Log-Linear Models
 Approximate discrete multidimensional probability
distributions.
 Given a set of tuples in n dimensions (e.g., described by
n attributes), we can consider each tuple as a point in an
n-dimensional space.
 Log-linear models can be used to estimate the probability
of each point in a multidimensional space for a set of
discretized attributes
 Regression can be computationally intensive when applied
to highdimensional data
 Log-linear models show good scalability for up to 10
dimensions

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 49

 Data Reduction Method (2): Histograms

 Divide data into buckets and store average (sum) for each bucket
 Partitioning rules:
 Equal-width: equal bucket range
 Equal-frequency (or equal-depth)
 V-optimal: with the least histogram variance (weighted sum of the
original values that each bucket represents)
 MaxDiff – Difference between each pair of adjacent values
 Highly effective in handling sparse and dense data

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 50

 Data Reduction Method (2): Histograms

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 51

 Data Reduction Method (2): Histograms

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 52

 Data Reduction Method (3): Clustering

 Clustering techniques consider data tuples as objects

 They partition the objects into groups or clusters, so that objects
within a cluster are “similar” to one another and “dissimilar” to
objects in other clusters.
 Partition data set into clusters based on similarity, and store cluster
representation (e.g., centroid and diameter) only
 In data reduction, the cluster representations of the data are used to
replace the actual data
 Can have hierarchical clustering and be stored in multi-dimensional
index tree structures
 There are many choices of clustering definitions and clustering
algorithms
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 53
 Data Reduction Method (3): Clustering

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 54

 Data Reduction Method (4): Sampling
 Sampling: obtaining a small sample s to represent the
whole data set N
 Allow a mining algorithm to run in complexity that is
potentially sub-linear to the size of the data
 Choose a representative subset of the data
 Simple random sampling may have very poor

performance in the presence of skew

 Develop adaptive sampling methods
 Stratified sampling:

 Approximate the percentage of each class (or

subpopulation of interest) in the overall database

 Used in conjunction with skewed data

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 55

 Data Reduction Method (4): Sampling
 Simple random sample without replacement (SRSWOR) of
size s
 Simple random sample with replacement (SRSWR) of size
s
 Cluster sample
 Stratified sample

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 56

 Sampling: with or without Replacement

W O R
SRS le random
i m p h ou t
( s e wi t
l
samp ment)
pl a c e
re

SRSW
R

Raw Data
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 57
 Sampling: Cluster

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 58

 Stratified Sampling

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 59

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Summary

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 60

 Discretization

 Three types of attributes:

 Nominal — values from an unordered set, e.g., color, profession
 Ordinal — values from an ordered set, e.g., military or academic
rank
 Continuous — real numbers, e.g., integer or real numbers
 Discretization:
 Divide the range of a continuous attribute into intervals
 Some classification algorithms only accept categorical attributes.
 Reduce data size by discretization
 Prepare for further analysis

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 61

 Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
 Discretization
 Reduce the number of values for a given continuous attribute by
dividing the range of the attribute into intervals
 Interval labels can then be used to replace actual data values
 Supervised vs. unsupervised
 Split (top-down) vs. merge (bottom-up)
 Discretization can be performed recursively on an attribute
 Concept hierarchy formation
 Recursively reduce the data by collecting and replacing low level
concepts (such as numeric values for age) by higher level concepts
(such as young, middle-aged, or senior)

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 62

 Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
Generation for Numeric Data
 Typical methods: All the methods can be applied recursively
 Binning
 Histogram analysis
 Entropy-based discretization: supervised, top-down split
 Interval merging by 2 Analysis: supervised, bottom-up merge
 Clustering analysis
 Either top-down split or bottom-up merge, unsupervised
 Segmentation by natural partitioning: top-down split,
unsupervised

July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 63

 Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
Generation for Numeric Data

 Binning
 Top-down splitting technique based on a specified
number of bins
 unsupervised discretization technique
 smoothing by bin means or smoothing by bin medians
 Histogram Analysis
 Unsupervised, top-down splitting
 Histograms partition the values for an attribute, A, into
disjoint ranges called buckets.
 Equal-width histogram
 Equal frequency histogram
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 64
 Entropy-Based Discretization
 Given a set of samples S, if S is partitioned into two intervals S 1 and S2
using boundary T, the information gain after partitioning is
|S | |S |
I ( S , T )  1 Entropy ( S 1)  2 Entropy ( S 2)
|S| |S|
 Entropy is calculated based on class distribution of the samples in the
set. Given m classes, the entropy of S1 is
m
Entropy ( S1 )   pi log 2 ( pi )
i 1

where pi is the probability of class i in S1

 The boundary that minimizes the entropy function over all possible
boundaries is selected as a binary discretization
 The process is recursively applied to partitions obtained until some
stopping criterion is met
 Such a boundary may reduce data size and improve classification
accuracy
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 65
 Interval Merge by 2 Analysis
 Merging-based (bottom-up) and Supervised
 Merge: Find the best neighboring intervals and merge them to form
larger intervals recursively
 ChiMerge
 Initially, each distinct value of a numerical attr. A is considered to be
one interval
 2 tests are performed for every pair of adjacent intervals
 Adjacent intervals with the least 2 values are merged together, since
low 2 values for a pair indicate similar class distributions
 This merge process proceeds recursively until a predefined stopping
criterion is met (such as significance level, max-interval, max
inconsistency, etc.)
July 9, 2022 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 66
 Cluster Analysis
 Clustering algorithm applied to discretize a numerical
attribute
 Closeness of data points considered to produce high-
quality discretization results.
 Topdown splitting strategy or a bottom-up merging
strategy
 Top down - Each initial cluster or partition may be further
decomposed into several subclusters, forming a lower
level of the hierarchy
 Bottom up - Clusters are formed by repeatedly grouping
neighboring clusters in order to form higher-level
concepts

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 Segmentation by Natural Partitioning

 A simply 3-4-5 rule can be used to segment numeric data

into relatively uniform, “natural” intervals.
 If an interval covers 3, 6, 7 or 9 distinct values at the
most significant digit, partition the range into 3 equi-
width intervals
 If it covers 2, 4, or 8 distinct values at the most
significant digit, partition the range into 4 intervals
 If it covers 1, 5, or 10 distinct values at the most
significant digit, partition the range into 5 intervals

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Concept Hierarchy Generation for Categorical Data

 Categorical data are discrete data

 Categorical attributes have a finite (but possibly large)
number of distinct values, with no ordering among the
values
 Examples include geographic location, job category, and
itemtype

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Concept Hierarchy Generation for Categorical Data

 Specification of a partial/total ordering of attributes

explicitly at the schema level by users or experts
 street < city < state < country
 Specification of a hierarchy for a set of values by explicit
data grouping
 {Guntur, Ananthpur, Vijayawada} < Andra
 {Hyderabad, Warangal, Nizamabad} < Telangana

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Concept Hierarchy Generation for Categorical Data

 Specification of a set of attributes, but not of their partial

ordering
 Automatic generation of hierarchies (or attribute
levels) by the analysis of the number of distinct values
 E.g., for a set of attributes: {street, city, state,
country}
 Specification of only a partial set of attributes
 E.g., only street < city, not others

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 Automatic Concept Hierarchy Generation
 Some hierarchies can be automatically generated based
on the analysis of the number of distinct values per
attribute in the data set
 The attribute with the most distinct values is placed

at the lowest level of the hierarchy

 Exceptions, e.g., weekday, month, quarter, year

country 15 distinct values

province_or_ state 365 distinct values

city 3567 distinct values

street 674,339 distinct values

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 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
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 Summary
 Data preparation or preprocessing is a big issue for both
data warehousing and data mining
 Discriptive data summarization is need for quality data
preprocessing
 Data preparation includes
 Data cleaning and data integration
 Data reduction and feature selection
 Discretization
 A lot of methods have been developed but data
preprocessing still an active area of research
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