191CSC503T DATA MINING UNIT-I

UNIT I

DATA MINING

Introduction to Data Mining Systems – Knowledge Discovery Process – Data Mining Techniques – Issues –
applications- Data Objects and attribute types, Statistical description of data, Data Pre- processing –
Cleaning, Integration, Reduction, Transformation and discretization, Data Visualization, Data similarity and
dissimilarity measures.

Data

• Collection of data objects and their attributes

• An attribute is a property or characteristic of an object
– Examples: eye color of a person, temperature, etc.
– Attribute is also known as variable, field, characteristic, or feature
• A collection of attributes describe an object
– Object is also known as record, point, case, sample, entity, or instance
Attributes

Tid Refund Marital Taxable

Status Income Cheat

1 Yes Single 125K No

2 No Married 100K No
3 No Single 70K No
4 Yes Married 120K No
5 No Divorced 95K Yes
6 No Married 60K No
7 Yes Divorced 220K No
8 No Single 85K Yes
9 No Married 75K No
10 No Single 90K Yes
Objects
Attribute Values
• Attribute values are numbers or symbols assigned to an attribute
• Distinction between attributes and attribute values
– Same attribute can be mapped to different attribute values
• Example: height can be measured in feet or meters
– Different attributes can be mapped to the same set of values

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• Example: Attribute values for ID and age are integers

• But properties of attribute values can be different
– ID has no limit but age has a maximum and minimum value
Types of Attributes
• There are different types of attributes
– Nominal
• Examples: ID numbers, eye color, zip codes
– Ordinal
• Examples: rankings (e.g., taste of potato chips on a scale from 1-10),
grades, height in {tall, medium, short}
– Interval
• Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
– Ratio
Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, time, counts

Evolution of Database Technology

Data mining primitives.

A data mining query is defined in terms of the following primitives

1. Task-relevant data: This is the database portion to be investigated. For example, suppose
that you are a manager of All Electronics in charge of sales in the United States and Canada. In
particular, you would like to study the buying trends of customers in Canada. Rather than
mining on the entire database. These are referred to as relevant attributes

2. The kinds of knowledge to be mined: This specifies the data mining functions to be
performed, such as characterization, discrimination, association, classification, clustering, or
evolution analysis. For instance, if studying the buying habits of customers in Canada, you
may choose to mine associations between customer profiles and the items that these
customers like to buy

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3. Background knowledge: Users can specify background knowledge, or knowledge about

the domain to be mined. This knowledge is useful for guiding the knowledge discovery
process, and for evaluating the patterns found. There are several kinds of background
knowledge.

4. Interestingness measures: These functions are used to separate uninteresting patterns

from knowledge. They may be used to guide the mining process, or after discovery, to
evaluate the discovered patterns. Different kinds of knowledge may have different
interestingness measures.

5. Presentation and visualization of discovered patterns: This refers to the form in which
discovered patterns are to be displayed. Users can choose from different forms for knowledge
presentation, such as rules, tables, charts, graphs, decision trees, and cubes.

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Figure : Primitives for specifying a data mining task.

Ent(S) E(T , S)

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Knowledge Discovery in Databases or KDD

Knowledge discovery as a process is depicted and consists of an iterative sequence of the

following steps:

 Data cleaning (to remove noise or irrelevant data),

 Data integration (where multiple data sources may be combined)
 Data selection (where data relevant to the analysis task are retrieved from the
database)
 Data transformation (where data are transformed or consolidated into forms
appropriate for mining by performing summary or aggregation operations, for
instance),
 Data mining (an essential process where intelligent methods are applied in order to
extract data patterns),
 Pattern evaluation (to identify the truly interesting patterns representing knowledge
based on some interestingness measures;), and
 Knowledge presentation (where visualization and knowledge representation
techniques are used to present the mined knowledge to the user).

Figure: Data mining as a process of knowledge discovery.

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Architecture of a typical data mining system.

The architecture of a typical data mining system may have the following major components

1. Database, data warehouse, or other information repository. This is one or a set of

databases, data warehouses, spread sheets, or other kinds of information repositories. Data
cleaning and data integration techniques may be performed on the data.

2. Database or data warehouse server. The database or data warehouse server is

responsible for fetching the relevant data, based on the user's data mining request.

3. Knowledge base. This is the domain knowledge that is used to guide the search, or
evaluate the interestingness of resulting patterns. Such knowledge can include concept
hierarchies, used to organize attributes or attribute values into different levels of abstraction.
Knowledge such as user beliefs, which can be used to assess a pattern's interestingness based
on its unexpectedness, may also be included.

4. Data mining engine. This is essential to the data mining system and ideally consists of a
set of functional modules for tasks such as characterization, association analysis,
classification, evolution and deviation analysis.

5. Pattern evaluation module. This component typically employs interestingness measures

and interacts with the data mining modules so as to focus the search towards interesting
patterns. It may access interestingness thresholds stored in the knowledge base. Alternatively,
the pattern evaluation module may be integrated with the mining module, depending on the
implementation of the data mining method used.

6. Graphical user interface. This module communicates between users and the data mining
system, allowing the user to interact with the system by specifying a data mining query or
task, providing information to help focus the search, and performing exploratory data mining
based on the intermediate data mining results.

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Figure: Architecture of a typical data mining system

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Major issues in data mining

The scope of this book addresses major issues in data mining regarding mining methodology,
user interaction, performance, and diverse data types. These issues are introduced below:
1. Mining methodology and user-interaction issues. These reect the kinds of knowledge
mined, the ability to mine knowledge at multiple granularities, the use of domain knowledge,
ad-hoc mining, and knowledge visualization.
Mining different kinds of knowledge in databases.
Since different users can be interested in different kinds of knowledge, data mining should
cover a wide spectrum of data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks, including data
characterization, discrimination, association, classification, clustering, trend and deviation
analysis, and similarity analysis. These tasks may use the same database in different ways and
require the development of numerous data mining techniques.
Interactive mining of knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction.
Since it is difficult to know exactly what can be discovered within a database, the data mining
process should be interactive. For databases containing a huge amount of data, appropriate
sampling technique can first be applied to facilitate interactive data exploration. Interactive
mining allows users to focus the search for patterns, providing and refining data mining
requests based on returned results. Specifically, knowledge should be mined by drilling-down,
rolling-up, and pivoting through the data space and knowledge space interactively, similar to
what OLAP can do on data cubes. In this way, the user can interact with the data mining
system to view data and discovered patterns at multiple granularities and from different
angles.

Incorporation of background knowledge.

Background knowledge, or information regarding the domain under study, may be used to
guide the discovery process and allow discovered patterns to be expressed in concise terms
and at different levels of abstraction. Domain knowledge related to databases, such as
integrity constraints and deduction rules, can help focus and speed up a data mining process,
or judge the interestingness of discovered patterns.

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Data mining query languages and ad-hoc data mining.

Relational query languages (such as SQL) allow users to pose ad-hoc queries for data retrieval.
In a similar vein, high-level data mining query languages need to be developed to allow users
to describe ad-hoc data mining tasks by facilitating the speci_cation of the relevant sets of data
for analysis, the domain knowledge, the kinds of knowledge to be mined, and the conditions
and interestingness constraints to be enforced on the discovered patterns. Such a language
should be integrated with a database or data warehouse query language, and optimized for
e_cient and exible data mining.

Presentation and visualization of data mining results.

Discovered knowledge should be expressed in high-level languages, visual representations, or
other expressive forms so that the knowledge can be easily understood and directly usable by
humans. This is especially crucial if the data mining system is to be interactive. This requires
the system to adopt expressive knowledge representation techniques, such as trees, tables,
rules, graphs, charts, crosstabs, matrices, or curves.

Handling outlier or incomplete data.

The data stored in a database may reect outliers | noise, exceptional cases, or incomplete data
objects. These objects may confuse the analysis process, causing over_tting of the data to the
knowledge modelconstructed. As a result, the accuracy of the discovered patterns can be
poor. Data cleaning methods and data analysis methods which can handle outliers are
required. While most methods discard outlier data, such data may be of interest in itself such
as in fraud detection for _nding unusual usage of tele-communication services or credit cards.
This form of data analysis is known as outlier mining.
Pattern evaluation: the interestingness problem.
A data mining system can uncover thousands of patterns. Many of the patterns discovered
may be uninteresting to the given user, representing common knowledge or lacking novelty.
Several challenges remain regarding the development of techniques to assess the

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interestingness of discovered patterns, particularly with regard to subjective measures which

estimate the value of patterns with respect to a given user class, based on user beliefs or
expectations. The use of interestingness measures to guide the discovery process and reduce
the search space is another active area of research.

2. Performance issues. These include efficiency, scalability, and parallelization of data

mining algorithms.
Efficiency and scalability of data mining algorithms.
To effectively extract information from a huge amount of data in databases, data mining
algorithms must be efficient and scalable. That is, the running time of a data mining algorithm
must be predictable and acceptable in large databases. Algorithms with exponential or even
medium-order polynomial complexity will not be of practical use. From a database
perspective on knowledge discovery, efficiency and scalability are key issues in the
implementation of data mining systems. Many of the issues discussed above under mining
methodology and user-interaction must also consider efficiency and scalability.

Parallel, distributed, and incremental updating algorithms.

The huge size of many databases, the wide distribution of data, and the computational
complexity of some data mining methods are factors motivating the development of parallel
and distributed data mining algorithms. Such algorithms divide the data into partitions, which
are processed in parallel. The results from the partitions are then merged. Moreover, the high
cost of some data mining processes promotes the need for incremental data mining
algorithms which incorporate database updates without having to mine the entire data again
\from scratch". Such algorithms perform knowledge modification incrementally to amend and
strengthen what was previously discovered.

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3. Issues relating to the diversity of database types.

Handling of relational and complex types of data.
There are many kinds of data stored in databases and data warehouses. Since relational
databases and data warehouses are widely used, the development of efficient and effective
data mining systems for such data is important. However, other databases may contain
complex data objects, hypertext and multimedia data, spatial data, temporal data, or
transaction data. It is unrealistic to expect one system to mine all kinds of data due to the
diversity of data types and different goals of data mining. Specific data mining systems should
be constructed for mining specific kinds of data. Therefore, one may expect to have different
data mining systems for different kinds of data.

Mining information from heterogeneous databases and global information systems.

Local and wide-area computer networks (such as the Internet) connect many sources of data,
forming huge, distributed, and heterogeneous databases. The discovery of knowledge from
di_erent sources of structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data with diverse data
semantics poses great challenges to data mining. Data mining may help disclose high-level
data regularities in multiple heterogeneous databases that are unlikely to be discovered by
simple query systems and may improve information exchange and interoperability in
heterogeneous databases.

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DataPreprocessing
Data cleaning.

Data cleaning routines attempt to fill in missing values, smooth out noise while
identifying outliers, and correct inconsistencies in the data.

(i). Missing values

1. Ignore the tuple: This is usually done when the class label is missing (assuming the mining
task involves classification or description). 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.

2. Fill in the missing value manually: In general, this approach is time-consuming and may
not be feasible given a large data set with many missing values.

3. Use a global constant to fill in the missing value: Replace all missing attribute values by
the same constant, such as a label like “Unknown". 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 recommended.

4. Use the attribute mean to fill in the missing value: For example, suppose that the
average income of All Electronics customers is $28,000. Use this value to replace the missing
value for income.

5. Use the attribute mean for all samples belonging to the same class as the given tuple:
For example, if classifying customers according to credit risk, replace the missing value with
the average income value for customers in the same credit risk category as that of the given
tuple.

6. Use the most probable value to fill in the missing value: This may be determined with
inference-based tools using a Bayesian formalism or decision tree induction. For example,

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using the other customer attributes in your data set, you may construct a decision tree to
predict the missing values for income.

(ii). Noisy data

Noise is a random error or variance in a measured variable.

1. Binning methods:

Binning methods smooth a sorted data value by consulting the ”neighborhood", or

values around it. The sorted values are distributed into a number of 'buckets', or bins.
Because binning methods consult the neighborhood of values, they perform local smoothing.
Figure illustrates some binning techniques.

In this example, the data for price are first sorted and partitioned into equi-depth bins
(of depth 3). 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.

(i).Sorted data for price (in dollars): 4, 8, 15, 21, 21, 24, 25, 28, 34

(ii).Partition into (equi-width) bins:

• Bin 1: 4, 8, 15
• Bin 2: 21, 21, 24
• Bin 3: 25, 28, 34
(iii).Smoothing by bin means:

- Bin 1: 9, 9, 9,

- Bin 2: 22, 22, 22

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- Bin 3: 29, 29, 29

(iv).Smoothing by bin boundaries:

• Bin 1: 4, 4, 15
• Bin 2: 21, 21, 24
• Bin 3: 25, 25, 34
2. Clustering:

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

Figure: Outliers may be detected by clustering analysis.

3. Combined computer and human inspection: Outliers may be identified through a

combination of computer and human inspection. In one application, for example, an
information-theoretic measure was used to help identify outlier patterns in a handwritten
character database for classification. The measure's value reflected the “surprise" content of
the predicted character label with respect to the known label. Outlier patterns may be
informative or “garbage". Patterns whose surprise content is above a threshold are output to

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a list. A human can then sort through the patterns in the list to identify the actual garbage
ones

4. Regression: Data can be smoothed by fitting the data to a function, such as with regression.
Linear regression involves finding the “best" line to fit two variables, so that one variable can
be used to predict the other. Multiple linear regression is an extension of linear regression,
where more than two variables are involved and the data are fit to a multidimensional
surface.

(iii). Inconsistent data

There may be inconsistencies in the data recorded for some transactions. Some data
inconsistencies may be corrected manually using external references. For example, errors
made at data entry may be corrected by performing a paper trace. This may be coupled with
routines designed to help correct the inconsistent use of codes. Knowledge engineering tools
may also be used to detect the violation of known data constraints. For example, known
functional dependencies between attributes can be used to find values contradicting the
functional constraints.

Data transformation.

In data transformation, the data are transformed or consolidated into forms

appropriate for mining. Data transformation can involve the following:

1. Normalization, where the attribute data are scaled so as to fall within a small specified
range, such as -1.0 to 1.0, or 0 to 1.0.

There are three main methods for data normalization : min-max normalization, z-
score normalization, and normalization by decimal scaling.

(i).Min-max normalization performs a linear transformation on the original data. Suppose

that minA and maxA are the minimum and maximum values of an attribute A. Min-max
normalization maps a value v of A to v0 in the range [new minA; new maxA] by computing

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(ii).z-score normalization (or zero-mean normalization), the values for an attribute A are
normalized based on the mean and standard deviation of A. A value v of A is normalized to v0
by computing where mean A and stand dev A are the mean and standard deviation,
respectively, of attribute A. This method of normalization is useful when the actual minimum
and maximum of attribute A are unknown, or when there are outliers which dominate the
min-max normalization.

(iii). Normalization by decimal scaling normalizes by moving the decimal point of values of
attribute A. The number of decimal points moved depends on the maximum absolute value of
A. A value v of A is normalized to v0by computing where j is the smallest integer such that

2. Smoothing, which works to remove the noise from data? Such techniques include binning,
clustering, and regression.

(i). Binning methods:

Binning methods smooth a sorted data value by consulting the ”neighborhood", or

values around it. The sorted values are distributed into a number of 'buckets', or bins. Because
binning methods consult the neighborhood of values, they perform local smoothing. Figure
illustrates some binning techniques.

In this example, the data for price are first sorted and partitioned into equi-depth bins
(of depth 3). 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

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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.

(i).Sorted data for price (in dollars): 4, 8, 15, 21, 21, 24, 25, 28, 34

(ii).Partition into (equi-width) bins:

• Bin 1: 4, 8, 15
• Bin 2: 21, 21, 24
• Bin 3: 25, 28, 34
(iii).Smoothing by bin means:

- Bin 1: 9, 9, 9,

- Bin 2: 22, 22, 22

- Bin 3: 29, 29, 29

(iv).Smoothing by bin boundaries:

• Bin 1: 4, 4, 15
• Bin 2: 21, 21, 24
• Bin 3: 25, 25, 34
(ii). Clustering:

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

Figure: Outliers may be detected by clustering analysis.

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3. Aggregation, where summary or aggregation operations are applied to the data. For
example, the daily sales data may be aggregated so as to compute monthly and annual total
amounts.

4. Generalization of the data, where low level or 'primitive' (raw) data are replaced by
higher level concepts through the use of concept hierarchies. For example, categorical
attributes, like street, can be generalized to higher level concepts, like city or county.

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.
That is, mining on the reduced data set should be more efficient yet produce the same (or
almost the same) analytical results.

Strategies for data reduction include the following.

1. Data cube aggregation, where aggregation operations are applied to the data in the
construction of a data cube.

2. Dimension reduction, where irrelevant, weakly relevant or redundant attributes or

dimensions may be detected and removed.

3. Data compression, where encoding mechanisms are used to reduce the data set size.

4. Numerosity reduction, where the data are replaced or estimated by alternative, smaller
data representations such as parametric models (which need store only the model

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parameters instead of the actual data), or nonparametric methods such as clustering,

sampling, and the use of histograms.

5. Discretization and concept hierarchy generation, where raw data values for attributes
are replaced by ranges or higher conceptual levels. Concept hierarchies allow the mining of
data at multiple levels of abstraction, and are a powerful tool for data mining.

Data Cube Aggregation

• The lowest level of a data cube

– 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
•
Dimensionality Reduction

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:

1. Step-wise forward selection: The procedure starts with an empty set of attributes. The
best of the original attributes is determined and added to the set. At each subsequent iteration
or step, the best of the remaining original attributes is added to the set.

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2. Step-wise 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 forward selection and backward elimination: The step-wise forward

selection and backward elimination methods can be combined, where at each step one selects
the best attribute and removes the

4. Decision tree induction: Decision tree algorithms, such as ID3 and C4.5, were originally
intended for classifcation. Decision tree induction constructs a flow-chart-like structure
where each internal (non-leaf) node denotes a test on an attribute, each branch corresponds
to an outcome of the test, and 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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Data compression

In data compression, 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
compression technique used is called lossless. If, instead, we can reconstruct only an
approximation of the original data, then the data compression technique is called lossy. The
two popular and effective methods of lossy data compression: wavelet transforms, and
principal components analysis.

Wavelet transforms

The discrete wavelet transform (DWT) is a linear signal processing technique that,
when applied to a data vector D, transforms it to a numerically different vector, D0, of wavelet
coefficients. The two vectors are of the same length.

The DWT is closely related to the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), a signal processing
technique involving sines and cosines. In general, however, the DWT achieves better lossy
compression.

The general algorithm for a discrete wavelet transform is as follows.

1. The length, L, of the input data vector must be an integer power of two. This condition
can be met by padding the data vector with zeros, as necessary.
2. Each transform involves applying two functions. The first applies some data smoothing,

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such as a sum or weighted average. The second performs a weighted difference.

3. The two functions are applied to pairs of the input data, resulting in two sets of data of
length L=2. In general, these respectively represent a smoothed version of the input
data, and the high-frequency content of it.
4. The two functions are recursively applied to the sets of data obtained in the previous
loop, until the resulting data sets obtained are of desired length.
5. A selection of values from the data sets obtained in the above iterations are designated
the wavelet coefficients of the transformed data.

Principal components analysis

Principal components analysis (PCA) searches for c k-dimensional orthogonal vectors

that can best be used to represent the data, where c << N. The original data is thus projected
onto a much smaller space, resulting in data compression. PCA can be used as a form of
dimensionality reduction. The initial data can then be projected onto this smaller set.

The basic procedure is 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 N orthonormal vectors which 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.

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.

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4. since the components are sorted according to decreasing order of “significance", the size of
the data can be reduced by eliminating the weaker components, i.e., those with low variance.
Using the strongest principal components, it should be possible to reconstruct a good
approximation of the original data.

Numerosity reduction

Regression and log-linear models

Regression and log-linear models can be used to approximate the given data. In linear
regression, the data are modeled to fit a straight line. For example, a random variable, Y
(called a response variable), can be modeled as a linear function of another random variable,
X (called a predictor variable), with the equation where the variance of Y is assumed to be
constant. These coefficients can be solved for by the method of least squares, which minimizes
the error between the actual line separating the data and the estimate of the line.

Multiple regression is an extension of linear regression allowing a response variable Y

to be modeled as a linear function of a multidimensional feature vector.

Log-linear models approximate discrete multidimensional probability distributions.

The method can be used to estimate the probability of each cell in a base cuboid for a set of
discretized attributes, based on the smaller cuboids making up the data cube lattice

Histograms

A histogram for an attribute A partitions the data distribution of A into disjoint subsets,
or buckets. The buckets are displayed on a horizontal axis, while the height (and area) of a
bucket typically reects the average frequency of the values represented by the bucket.

1. Equi-width: In an equi-width histogram, the width of each bucket range is constant (such as
the width of $10 for the buckets in Figure 3.8).

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2. Equi-depth (or equi-height): In an equi-depth histogram, the buckets are created so that,
roughly, the frequency of each bucket is constant (that is, each bucket contains roughly the
same number of contiguous data samples).

3. V-Optimal: If we consider all of the possible histograms for a given number of buckets, the
V-optimal histogram is the one with the least variance. Histogram variance is a weighted sum
of the original values that each bucket represents, where bucket weight is equal to the
number of values in the bucket.

4. MaxDiff: In a MaxDiff histogram, we consider the difference between each pair of adjacent
values. A bucket boundary is established between each pair for pairs having the largest
differences, where is user-specified.

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. Similarity is commonly defined in terms of how
“close" the objects are in space, based on a distance function. The “quality" of a cluster may be
represented by its diameter, the maximum distance between any two objects in the cluster.
Centroid distance is an alternative measure of cluster quality, and is defined as the average
distance of each cluster object from the cluster centroid.

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Sampling

Sampling can be used as a data reduction technique since it allows a large data set to be
represented by a much smaller random sample (or subset) of the data. Suppose that a large
data set, D, contains N tuples. Let's have a look at some possible samples for D.

1. Simple random sample without replacement (SRSWOR) of size n: This is created by

drawing n of the N tuples from D (n < N), where the probably of drawing any tuple in D is 1=N,
i.e., all tuples are equally likely.

2. Simple random sample with replacement (SRSWR) of size n: This is similar to SRSWOR,
except that each time a tuple is drawn from D, it is recorded and then replaced. That is, after a
tuple is drawn, it is placed back in D so that it may be drawn again.

3. Cluster sample: If the tuples in D are grouped into M mutually disjoint “clusters", then a
SRS of m clusters can be obtained, where m < M. A reduced data representation can be
obtained by applying, say, SRSWOR to the pages, resulting in a cluster sample of the tuples.

4. Stratified sample: If D is divided into mutually disjoint parts called “strata", a stratified
sample of D is generated by obtaining a SRS at each stratum. This helps to ensure a
representative sample, especially when the data are skewed. For example, a stratified sample
may be obtained from customer data, where stratum is created for each customer age group.

Figure : Sampling can be used for data reduction.

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Major Issues in Data Warehousing and Mining

• Mining methodology and user interaction

– Mining different kinds of knowledge in databases
– Interactive mining of knowledge at multiple levels of abstraction
– Incorporation of background knowledge
– Data mining query languages and ad-hoc data mining
– Expression and visualization of data mining results
– Handling noise and incomplete data
– Pattern evaluation: the interestingness problem
• Performance and scalability
– Efficiency and scalability of data mining algorithms
– Parallel, distributed and incremental mining methods

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• Issues relating to the diversity of data types

– Handling relational and complex types of data
– Mining information from heterogeneous databases and global information
systems (WWW)
• Issues related to applications and social impacts
– Application of discovered knowledge
• Domain-specific data mining tools

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