Debre Tabor University

Gafat Institute of Technology

Department of Computer Science

Introduction to Data Mining & Warehousing

For 4th Year IT Computer Science students
Instructors: Habtu Hailu (PhD)

November, 24
 Chapter III

DATA PRE-PROSSESSING

2
 Data Preprocessing

 Why Data preprocessing?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
3
 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

4
 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
5
 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

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 Multi-Dimensional Measure of Data
Quality

 A well-accepted multidimensional view:

 Accuracy

 Completeness

 Consistency

 Timeliness

 Believability

 Value added

 Interpretability

 Accessibility

 Broad categories:
 Intrinsic, contextual, representational, and

accessibility

7
 3) 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
 Concept hierarchy generation
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Forms of Data
Preprocessing

9
 Data Preprocessing

 Why Data preprocessing?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
10
 Data Cleaning

 Data cleaning tasks

 Fill in missing values

 Identify outliers and smooth out noisy data

 Correct inconsistent data

 Resolve redundancy caused by data

integration

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 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.

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 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 and infeasible?
 Fill in it automatically with
 a global constant : e.g., “unknown”, a new class?!
 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

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 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

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 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)

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 Simple Discretization Methods:
Binning

 Equal-width (distance) partitioning

 Divides the range into N intervals of equal size: uniform
grid
 if A and B are the lowest and highest values of the
attribute, the width of intervals will be: W = (B –A)/N.
 The most straightforward, but outliers may dominate
presentation
 Skewed data is not handled well
 Equal-depth (frequency) partitioning
 Divides the range into N intervals, each containing
approximately same number of samples
 Good data scaling 16
 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

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 Regression
 Smooth by fitting the data y
into Regression Functions
 Finding a fitting function
for two dimensional case Y1
so that the value of the
second variable can be
estimated using the value
of the first variable
Y1’ y=x+1

X1 x
• It can be extended to N dimensional case in which regression finds
multidimensional space so that value of one of the dimension can be
predicted from the rest N-1 values

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 Cluster Analysis
Each cluster centroid is marked with a “+”, representing the average point
in space for that cluster. Outliers may be detected as values that fall
outside of the sets of clusters

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 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

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

20
 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

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 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 22
 Correlation Analysis (Numerical Data)

 Correlation coefficient (also called Pearson’s

product moment coefficient)

rA, B 
 (A  A)( B  B )

 ( AB)  n AB
( 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 23
 Correlation Analysis (Categorical
Data)

 Χ2 (chi-square) test: a statistical procedure used to

determine if there is a correlation between two categorical
variables (Observed  Expected ) 2
 2 
Expected

 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
 Correlation does not imply causality
 # of hospitals and # of car-theft in a city are correlated
 Both are causally linked to the third variable: population 24
 Chi-Square Calculation: An
Example

Play Not play Sum

chess chess (row)
Like science fiction 250(90) 200(360) 450

Not like science 50(210) 1000(840) 1050

fiction
Sum(col.) 300 1200 1500
 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 like_science_fiction and play_chess
are correlated in the group
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 Data Transformation
 This involves:
 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

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

73,600  54,000
 Ex. Let μ = 54,000, σ = 16,000. Then 1.225
16,000
 Normalization by decimal scaling
v
v'  j Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1
10
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 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
28
 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

 Numerosity reduction

 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation

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 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
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 Data Cube Aggregation:
Example

Figure: Sales data for a given branch of AllElectronics for the year 2002 to 2004. On the left, the
sales are shown per quarter. On the right, the data are aggregated to provide the annual sales.

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 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

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 Heuristic Attribute Selection
Methods(1)
 There are 2d possible sub-features of d features
 Several heuristic feature selection methods:
 Best single features under the feature

independence assumption: choose by

significance tests

Stepwise forward selection:

Starts with an empty set of attributes as the reduced
set.

The best of the original attributes is determined and
added to the reduced set.

At each subsequent iteration or step, the best of the
remaining original attributes is added to the set … etc.

Stepwise backward elimination:

Starts with the full set of attributes.

At each step, it removes the worst attribute remaining
in the set.
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 Heuristic Attribute Selection
Methods(2)
 Combination of forward selection and backward
elimination:

The stepwise forward selection and backward
elimination methods can be combined.

At each step, the procedure selects the best attribute
and removes the worst from among the remaining
attributes.
 Decision tree induction:

Decision tree algorithms, such as ID3, C4.5, and CART,
were originally intended for classification.

It constructs a flow chart like structure
 Each internal (nonleaf) node denotes a test on an attribute,
 Each branch corresponds to an outcome of the test
 Each external (leaf) node denotes a class prediction
 At each node, the algorithm chooses the “best” attribute to
partition the data into individual classes.
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Heuristic Attribute Selection Methods:
Example

35
 Dimensionality Reduction
 Data encoding or transformations are applied so as to obtain
a reduced or “compressed” representation of the original
data.
 If the original data can be reconstructed from the compressed
data without any loss of information, the data reduction is
called lossless.
 If, instead, we can reconstruct only an approximation of the
original data, then the data reduction is called lossy.
 There are several well-tuned algorithms for string
compression. Although they are typically lossless, they allow
only limited manipulation of the data.
 Two popular and effective methods of lossy dimensionality
reduction:
 Wavelet transforms

 Principal components analysis

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 Data
Compression

Original Data Compressed

Data
lossless

s s y
lo
Original Data
Approximated

37
 Data Reduction Method:
Clustering

 Partition data set into clusters based on similarity, and store

cluster representation (e.g., centroid and diameter) only
 Can be very effective if data is clustered but not if data is
“smeared”
 Can have hierarchical clustering and be stored in multi-
dimensional index tree structures
 There are many choices of clustering definitions and
clustering algorithms.

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 Data Reduction Method: 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
 Note: Sampling may not reduce database I/Os (page at a
time)

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Sampling: with or without
Replacement

WOR
S RS dom r an
m p l e o ut
( s i wi t h
p l e
sa m m e nt )
p l a ce
re

SRSW
R

Raw Data
40
Sampling: Cluster or Stratified
Sampling

Raw Data Cluster/Stratified Sample

41
 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
42
 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
43
 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
44
Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
Generation for Numeric Data
 Typical methods: All the methods can be applied recursively
 Binning (covered above)

Top-down split, unsupervised,
 Histogram analysis

Top-down split, unsupervised
 Clustering analysis (covered above)

Either top-down split or bottom-up merge, unsupervised
 Entropy-based discretization: supervised, top-down split
 Segmentation by natural partitioning: top-down split,
unsupervised

45
 Entropy-Based Discretization
 Given a set of samples S, if S is partitioned into two intervals
S1 and S2 using boundary T, the information gain after
| | | |
partitioning is I ( S , T )  S 1 Entropy ( S 1)  S 2 Entropy ( S 2)
|S| |S|

 Entropy is calculated based on class distribution of the

m
Entropy ( S )   p log ( p )
1 i 2 i
samples in the set. Given m classes, the entropy of S1 is
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 46
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
 {Urbana, Champaign, Chicago} < Illinois
 Specification of only a partial set of attributes
 E.g., only street < city, not others
 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,
48
 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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 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
50
 Summary
 Data preparation or preprocessing is a big issue
for both data warehousing and data mining
 Descriptive data summarization is need for quality
data preprocessing
 Data preparation includes
 Data cleaning and data integration
 Data reduction and feature selection
 Discretization
 A lot a methods have been developed but data
preprocessing still an active area of research
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