Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Motivation
 To better understand the data: central tendency,
variation and spread
 Data dispersion characteristics
 median, max, min, quantiles, outliers, variance, etc.
 Numerical dimensions correspond to sorted intervals
 Data dispersion: analyzed with multiple granularities
of precision
 Boxplot or quantile analysis on sorted intervals
 Dispersion analysis on computed measures
 Folding measures into numerical dimensions
 Boxplot or quantile analysis on the transformed cube
1
 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population): 1 n
x   xi   x
Note: n is sample size and N is population size. n i 1 N
n
Weighted arithmetic mean:
w x

i i
 Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values x i 1
n
 Median: w
i 1
i

 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of

the middle two values otherwise
 Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data):
n / 2  ( freq )l
median  L1  ( ) width
 Mode freq median
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula: mean  mode  3  (mean  median)
2
Symmetric vs. Skewed Data
 Median, mean and mode of symmetric
symmetric, positively and
negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

January 26, 2025 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 3

 Measuring the Dispersion of Data
 Quartiles, outliers and boxplots
 Quartiles: Q1 (25th percentile), Q3 (75th percentile)
 Inter-quartile range: IQR = Q3 – Q1
 Five number summary: min, Q1, median, Q3, max
 Boxplot: ends of the box are the quartiles; median is marked; add
whiskers, and plot outliers individually
 Outlier: usually, a value higher/lower than 1.5 x IQR
 Variance and standard deviation (sample: s, population: σ)
 Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)
1 n 1 n 2 1 n
 [ xi  ( xi ) 2 ]
n n
1 1
s  ( xi  x )         xi   2
2 2 2 2 2
( x )
n  1 i 1 n  1 i 1 n i 1 N i 1
i
N i 1

 Standard deviation s (or σ) is the square root of variance s2 (or σ2)

4
 Boxplot Analysis

 Five-number summary of a distribution

 Minimum, Q1, Median, 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 extended
to Minimum and Maximum
 Outliers: points beyond a specified outlier
threshold, plotted individually

5
 Properties of Normal Distribution Curve

 The normal (distribution) curve

 From μ–σ to μ+σ: contains about 68% of the

measurements (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation)

 From μ–2σ to μ+2σ: contains about 95% of it
 From μ–3σ to μ+3σ: contains about 99.7% of it

6
Graphic Displays of Basic Statistical Descriptions

 Boxplot: graphic display of five-number summary

 Histogram: x-axis are values, y-axis repres. frequencies
 Quantile plot: each value xi is paired with fi indicating
that approximately 100 fi % of data are  xi
 Quantile-quantile (q-q) plot: graphs the quantiles of
one univariant distribution against the corresponding
quantiles of another
 Scatter plot: each pair of values is a pair of coordinates
and plotted as points in the plane

7
 Quantile Plot
 Displays all of the data (allowing the user to assess both
the overall behavior and unusual occurrences)
 Plots quantile information
 For a data xi data sorted in increasing order, fi
indicates that approximately 100 fi% of the data are
below or equal to the value xi

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 8

 Quantile-Quantile (Q-Q) Plot
 Graphs the quantiles of one univariate distribution against the
corresponding quantiles of another
 View: Is there is a shift in going from one distribution to another?
 Example shows unit price of items sold at Branch 1 vs. Branch 2 for
each quantile. Unit prices of items sold at Branch 1 tend to be lower
than those at Branch 2.

9
 Scatter plot
 Provides a first look at bivariate data to see clusters of
points, outliers, etc
 Each pair of values is treated as a pair of coordinates and
plotted as points in the plane

10
Positively and Negatively Correlated Data

 The left half fragment is positively

correlated
 The right half is negative correlated

11
Uncorrelated Data

12
 Similarity and Dissimilarity
 Similarity
 Numerical measure of how alike two data objects are

 Value is higher when objects are more alike

 Often falls in the range [0,1]

 Dissimilarity (e.g., distance)

 Numerical measure of how different two data objects

are
 Lower when objects are more alike

 Minimum dissimilarity is often 0

 Upper limit varies

 Proximity refers to a similarity or dissimilarity

13
 Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
 Data matrix
 n data points with p  x11 ... x1f ... x1p 
 
dimensions  ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xip 
 Two modes
... xif
 i1 
 ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xnf ... xnp 
 n1 
 Dissimilarity matrix
 0 
 n data points, but
 d(2,1) 0 
registers only the  
 d(3,1) d ( 3,2) 0 
distance  
 A triangular matrix  : : : 
d ( n,1) d ( n,2) ... ... 0
 Single mode

14
 Proximity Measure for Nominal Attributes

 Can take 2 or more states, e.g., red, yellow, blue,

green (generalization of a binary attribute)
 Method 1: Simple matching
 m: # of matches, p: total # of variables
d (i, j)  p 
p
m

 Method 2: Use a large number of binary attributes

 creating a new binary attribute for each of the
M nominal states

15
 Proximity Measure for Binary Attributes
Object j
 A contingency table for binary data
Object i

 Distance measure for symmetric

binary variables:
 Distance measure for asymmetric
binary variables:
 Jaccard coefficient (similarity
measure for asymmetric binary
variables):
 Note: Jaccard coefficient is the same as “coherence”:

16
 Dissimilarity between Binary Variables
 Example
Name Gender Fever Cough Test-1 Test-2 Test-3 Test-4
Jack M Y N P N N N
Mary F Y N P N P N
Jim M Y P N N N N

 Gender is a symmetric attribute

 The remaining attributes are asymmetric binary
 Let the values Y and P be 1, and the value N 0
01
d ( jack , m ary)   0.33
2 01
11
d ( jack , jim )   0.67
111
1 2
d ( jim , m ary)   0.75
11 2
17
 Standardizing Numeric Data
x
z   
 Z-score:
 X: raw score to be standardized, μ: mean of the population, σ:
standard deviation
 the distance between the raw score and the population mean in
units of the standard deviation
 negative when the raw score is below the mean, “+” when above
 An alternative way: Calculate the mean absolute deviation
sf  1
n (| x1 f  m f |  | x2 f  m f | ... | xnf  m f |)
where m  1 (x  x  ...  x )
n 1f 2 f xif  m f
.
f nf

zif  sf
 standardized measure (z-score):
 Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using standard
deviation

18
 Example:
Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
Data Matrix
point attribute1 attribute2
x1 1 2
x2 3 5
x3 2 0
x4 4 5

Dissimilarity Matrix
(with Euclidean Distance)

x1 x2 x3 x4
x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 5.1 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0

19
Distance on Numeric Data: Minkowski Distance
 Minkowski distance: A popular distance measure

where i = (xi1, xi2, …, xip) and j = (xj1, xj2, …, xjp) are two
p-dimensional data objects, and h is the order (the
distance so defined is also called L-h norm)
 Properties
 d(i, j) > 0 if i ≠ j, and d(i, i) = 0 (Positive definiteness)
 d(i, j) = d(j, i) (Symmetry)
 d(i, j)  d(i, k) + d(k, j) (Triangle Inequality)
 A distance that satisfies these properties is a metric
20
 Special Cases of Minkowski Distance
 h = 1: Manhattan (city block, L1 norm) distance
 E.g., the Hamming distance: the number of bits that are

different between two binary vectors

d (i, j) | x  x |  | x  x | ... | x  x |
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h = 2: (L2 norm) Euclidean distance

d (i, j)  (| x  x |2  | x  x |2 ... | x  x |2 )
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h  . “supremum” (Lmax norm, L norm) distance.

 This is the maximum difference between any component

(attribute) of the vectors

21
 Example: Minkowski Distance
Dissimilarity Matrices
point attribute 1 attribute 2 Manhattan (L1)
x1 1 2
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x2 3 5 x1 0
x3 2 0 x2 5 0
x4 4 5 x3 3 6 0
x4 6 1 7 0
Euclidean (L2)
L2 x1 x2 x3 x4
x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 2.24 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0

Supremum
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x1 0
x2 3 0
x3 2 5 0
x4 3 1 5 0
22
 Ordinal Variables

 An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous

 Order is important, e.g., rank
 Can be treated like interval-scaled
 replace xif by their rank rif {1,..., M f }
 map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing
i-th object in the f-th variable by
rif 1
zif 
M f 1
 compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval-
scaled variables

23
 Attributes of Mixed Type

 A database may contain all attribute types

 Nominal, symmetric binary, asymmetric binary, numeric,
ordinal
 One may use a weighted formula to combine their effects
 pf  1 ij( f ) dij( f )
d (i, j) 
 pf  1 ij( f )
 f is binary or nominal:
dij(f) = 0 if xif = xjf , or dij(f) = 1 otherwise
 f is numeric: use the normalized distance
 f is ordinal
 Compute ranks rif and rif  1
zif 
 Treat zif as interval-scaled M f 1
24
 Cosine Similarity
 A document can be represented by thousands of attributes, each
recording the frequency of a particular word (such as keywords) or
phrase in the document.

 Other vector objects: gene features in micro-arrays, …

 Applications: information retrieval, biologic taxonomy, gene feature
mapping, ...
 Cosine measure: If d1 and d2 are two vectors (e.g., term-frequency
vectors), then
cos(d1, d2) = (d1  d2) /||d1|| ||d2|| ,
where  indicates vector dot product, ||d||: the length of vector d

25
 Example: Cosine Similarity
 cos(d1, d2) = (d1  d2) /||d1|| ||d2|| ,
where  indicates vector dot product, ||d|: the length of vector d

 Ex: Find the similarity between documents 1 and 2.

d1 = (5, 0, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0)
d2 = (3, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1)

d1d2 = 5*3+0*0+3*2+0*0+2*1+0*1+0*1+2*1+0*0+0*1 = 25
||d1||= (5*5+0*0+3*3+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0)0.5=(42)0.5
= 6.481
||d2||= (3*3+0*0+2*2+0*0+1*1+1*1+0*0+1*1+0*0+1*1)0.5=(17)0.5
= 4.12
cos(d1, d2 ) = 0.94

26