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Why Data Preprocessing

The document discusses why data preprocessing is important. Real-world data is often dirty, incomplete, noisy, and inconsistent which can negatively impact analysis. Data preprocessing aims to clean data by handling missing values, identifying outliers, resolving inconsistencies, integrating multiple sources, and reducing data volume while maintaining quality. The major tasks involve data cleaning, integration, and reduction.

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9 views

Why Data Preprocessing

The document discusses why data preprocessing is important. Real-world data is often dirty, incomplete, noisy, and inconsistent which can negatively impact analysis. Data preprocessing aims to clean data by handling missing values, identifying outliers, resolving inconsistencies, integrating multiple sources, and reducing data volume while maintaining quality. The major tasks involve data cleaning, integration, and reduction.

Uploaded by

kusamee0
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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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

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
Why Is Data Preprocessing Important?

■ No quality data, no quality mining results!

o Quality decisions must be based on quality data


 e.g., duplicate or missing data may cause incorrect or even
misleading statistics.
o Data warehouse needs consistent integration of quality data

■ Data extraction, cleaning, and transformation comprises the majority of the


work of building a data warehouse.

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.
Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data cleaning
o Fill in missing values, smooth noisy data, identify or remove outliers,
and resolve inconsistencies
 Data integration
o Integration of multiple databases, data cubes, or files
 Data reduction
o Obtains reduced representation in volume but produces the same or
similar analytical results

Forms of Data Preprocessing


Data Cleaning
1. 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
2. Data cleaning tasks
 Fill in missing values
 Identify outliers and smooth out noisy data
 Correct inconsistent data
 Resolve redundancy caused by data integration
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.

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

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

Handling Redundancy in Data Integration


o 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
o Redundant attributes may be able to be detected by correlation analysis
o Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may help
reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and improve mining speed
and quality
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:
⇰ Dimensionality reduction — e.g., remove unimportant attributes
⇰ Data Compression
⇰ Numerosity reduction — e.g., fit data into models
⇰ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation

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