Data Mining: Data

Lecture Notes for Chapter 2

nd
Introduction to Data Mining , 2 Edition
by
Tan, Steinbach, Kumar
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Outline

● Attributes and Objects

● Types of Data

● Data Quality

● Similarity and Distance

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● Data Preprocessing
What is Data?
● Collection of data objects
Attributes
and their attributes
● An attribute is a property or Objects
characteristic of an object
– Examples: eye color of a
person, temperature, etc.
– Attribute is also known as
variable, field, characteristic,
dimension, or feature
 ● A collection of attributes describe an object
– Object is also known as record, point, case, sample, entity, or
instance
Attribute Values

● Attribute values are numbers or symbols

assigned to an attribute for a particular object

● Distinction between attributes and attribute values

– Same attribute can be mapped to different attribute
values
◆ Example: height can be measured in feet or meters
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– Different attributes can be mapped to the same set of
values
◆ Example: Attribute values for ID and age are integers
– But properties of attribute can be different than the
properties of the values used to represent the
attribute
 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 {tall, medium, short}
– Interval
◆ Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or
Fahrenheit.

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 – Ratio
◆ Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, counts,
elapsed time (e.g., time to run a race)
Properties of Attribute Values
● The type of an attribute depends on which of the
following properties/operations it possesses:
– Distinctness: = ≠ – Order: < >
– Differences are + - meaningful :
– Ratios are * / meaningful
– Nominal attribute: distinctness
– Ordinal attribute: distinctness & order

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 – Interval attribute: distinctness, order & meaningful
differences
– Ratio attribute: all 4 properties/operations
Difference Between Ratio and
Interval
● Is it physically meaningful to say that a
temperature of 10 ° is twice that of 5° on
– the Celsius scale?
– the Fahrenheit scale?
– the Kelvin scale?

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 ● Consider measuring the height above average
– If Bill’s height is three inches above average and Bob’s
height is six inches above average, then would we say
that Bob is twice as tall as Bill?
– Is this situation analogous to that of temperature?

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This categorization of attributes is due to S. S. Stevens
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 This categorization of attributes is due to S. S. Stevens

Discrete and Continuous

Attributes

● Discrete Attribute
– Has only a finite or countably infinite set of values
– Examples: zip codes, counts, or the set of words in
a collection of documents
– Often represented as integer variables.
– Note: binary attributes are a special case of discrete
attributes
● Continuous Attribute
 – Has real numbers as attribute values – Examples:
temperature, height, or weight.
– Practically, real values can only be measured and
represented using a finite number of digits.
– Continuous attributes are typically represented as
floating-point variables.

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 Asymmetric Attributes
● Only presence (a non-zero attribute value) is regarded as
important
◆ Words present in documents
◆ Items present in customer transactions

● If we met a friend in the grocery store would we ever say

the following?
“I see our purchases are very similar since we didn’t buy most
of the same things.”
Key Messages for Attribute Types

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 ● The types of operations you choose should be
“meaningful” for the type of data you have
– Distinctness, order, meaningful intervals, and meaningful
ratios are only four (among many possible) properties of data

– The data type you see – often numbers or strings – may not
capture all the properties or may suggest properties that are
not present

– Analysis may depend on these other properties of the data

◆ Many statistical analyses depend only on the distribution

– In the end, what is meaningful can be specific to domain

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Important Characteristics of Data
– Dimensionality (number of attributes)
◆ High dimensional data brings a number of challenges

– Sparsity
◆ Only presence counts

– Resolution
◆ Patterns depend on the scale

– Size

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 ◆ Type of analysis may depend on size of data

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Types of data sets
● Record
– Data Matrix
– Document Data
– Transaction Data
● Graph
– World Wide Web
– Molecular Structures
● Ordered
– Spatial Data
– Temporal Data

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 – Sequential Data
– Genetic Sequence Data
Record Data

● Data that consists of a collection of records, each

of which consists of a fixed set of attributes

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Document Data

● Each document becomes a ‘term’ vector

– Each term is a component (attribute) of the vector
– The value of each component is the number of times
the corresponding term occurs in the document.

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Transaction Data
● A special type of data, where
– Each transaction involves a set of items.

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 – For example, consider a grocery store. The set of products
purchased by a customer during one shopping trip constitute a
transaction, while the individual products that were purchased
are the items.
– Can represent transaction data as record data

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Graph Data
● Examples: Generic graph, a molecule, and webpages

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Benzene Molecule: C6H6

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Ordered Data

● Genomic sequence data

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Ordered Data

● Spatio-
Temporal
Data

Average
Monthly

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Temperature of land
and ocean
Data Quality
● Poor data quality negatively affects many data
processing efforts

● Data mining example: a classification model for detecting

people who are loan risks is built using poor data
– Some credit-worthy candidates are denied loans
– More loans are given to individuals that default

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Data Quality …

● What kinds of data quality problems?

● How can we detect problems with the data? ●
What can we do about these problems?

● Examples of data quality problems:

– Noise and outliers
– Wrong data
– Fake data
– Missing values
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 – Duplicate data
Noise
● For objects, noise is an extraneous object
● For attributes, noise refers to modification of original
values
– Examples: distortion of a person’s voice when talking on a

poor phone and “snow” on television screen

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 – The figures below show two sine waves of the same magnitude
and different frequencies, the waves combined, and the two
sine waves with random noise
◆ The magnitude and shape of the original signal is distorted

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Outliers

● Outliers are data objects with characteristics that

are considerably different than most of the other
data objects in the
data set
– Case 1: Outliers are
noise that interferes
with data analysis

– Case 2: Outliers are

the goal of our
analysis
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 ◆ Credit card fraud ◆ Intrusion detection

● Causes?
Missing Values

● Reasons for missing values

– Information is not collected
(e. g., people decline to give their age and
weight)
– Attributes may not be applicable to all cases
(e. g., annual income is not applicable to
children)

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● Handling missing values
– Eliminate data objects or variables
– Estimate missing values
◆ Example: time series of temperature
◆ Example: census results

– Ignore the missing value during analysis

Duplicate Data

● Data set may include data objects that are

duplicates, or almost duplicates of one another
– Major issue when merging data from heterogeneous
sources

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● Examples:
– Same person with multiple email addresses

● Data cleaning
– Process of dealing with duplicate data issues

● When should duplicate data not be removed?

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 Similarity and Dissimilarity
Measures

● Similarity measure
– Numerical measure of how alike two data objects are.
– Is higher when objects are more alike.
– Often falls in the range [0,1]
● Dissimilarity measure
– Numerical measure of how different two data objects
are
– Lower when objects are more alike

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 Euclidean Distance
– Minimum dissimilarity is often 0
– Upper limit varies
● Proximity
refers to a similarity or dissimilarity
Similarity/Dissimilarity for Simple
Attributes

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The following table shows the similarity and dissimilarity
between two objects, x and y, with respect to a single, simple
attribute.

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 Euclidean Distance
● Euclidean Distance

where n is the number of dimensions (attributes) and th

attributes xk and yk are, respectively, the k
(components) or data objects x and y.

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 p1 p2 p3 p4

p1

p2

p3

p4
●
● Standardization is
necessary, if scales
differ.
Distance Matrix

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 Euclidean Distance

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 Distance Matrix
Minkowski Distance

● Minkowski Distance is a generalization of Euclidean

Distance

Where r is a parameter, n is the number of dimensions

(attributes) and xk and yk are, respectively, the kth attributes
(components) or data objects x and y.

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Minkowski Distance: Examples

● r = 1. City block (Manhattan, taxicab, L1 norm) distance.

– A common example of this for binary vectors is the Hamming
distance, which is just the number of bits that are different
between two binary vectors

● r = 2. Euclidean distance

● r → ∞. “supremum” (Lmax norm, L∞ norm) distance.

– This is the maximum difference between any component of
the vectors

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● Do not confuse r with n, i.e., all these distances are defined
for all numbers of dimensions.

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Minkowski Distance

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 Distance Matrix

Mahalanobis Distance

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 Σ is the covariance matrix

For red points, the

Euclidean distance is 14.7,
Mahalanobis distance is 6.

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 Covariance
Matrix:

B A: (0.5, 0.5)
B: (0, 1)
A
C: (1.5, 1.5)

Mahal(A,B) = 5
Mahal(A,C) = 4

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Mahalanobis Distance

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 Common Properties of a Distance
● Distances, such as the Euclidean distance,
have some well known properties.
1. d(x, y) ≥ 0 for all x and y and d(x, y) = 0 if and only
if x = y.
2. d(x, y) = d(y, x) for all x and y. (Symmetry)
3. d(x, z) ≤ d(x, y) + d(y, z) for all points x, y, and z.
(Triangle Inequality)

where d(x, y) is the distance (dissimilarity) between

points (data objects), x and y.

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 ● A distance that satisfies these properties is a
metric
Common Properties of a Similarity

● Similarities, also have some well known

properties. 1. s(x, y) = 1 (or maximum similarity)
only if x = y.
(does not always hold, e.g., cosine)

2. s(x, y) = s(y, x) for all x and y. (Symmetry)

where s(x, y) is the similarity between points (data

objects), x and y.
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 Similarity Between Binary Vectors
● Common situation is that objects, x and y, have only binary
attributes

● Compute similarities using the following quantities f01 = the

number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 1 f10 = the number
of attributes where x was 1 and y was 0 f00 = the number of
attributes where x was 0 and y was 0 f11 = the number of
attributes where x was 1 and y was 1

● Simple Matching and Jaccard Coefficients

SMC = number of matches / number of attributes
= (f11 + f00) / (f01 + f10 + f11 + f00)

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 J = number of 11 matches / number of non-zero attributes
= (f11) / (f01 + f10 + f11)
SMC versus Jaccard: Example
x= 1000000000 y
= 0000001001

f01 = ? (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 1)

f10 = ? (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 0)
f00 = ? (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 0)
f11 = ? (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 1)

SMC versus Jaccard: Example

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 x= 1000000000 y
= 0000001001

f01 = 2 (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 1)

f10 = 1 (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 0)
f00 = 7 (the number of attributes where x was 0 and y was 0)
f11 = 0 (the number of attributes where x was 1 and y was 1)

SMC = (f11 + f00) / (f01 + f10 + f11 + f00)

= (0+7) / (2+1+0+7) = 0.7

J = (f11) / (f01 + f10 + f11) = 0 / (2 + 1 + 0) = 0

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 Cosine Similarity
● If d1 and d2 are two document vectors, then
cos( d1, d2 ) = <d1,d2> / ||d1|| ||d2|| ,
where <d1,d2> indicates inner product or vector dot product
of vectors, d1 and d2, and || d || is the length of vector d.

● Example:
d1 = 3 2 0 5 0 0 0 2 0 0
d2 = 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2
<d1, d2> =

|| d1 || =

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 || d2 || =
cos(d1, d2 ) =

Cosine Similarity
● If d1 and d2 are two document vectors, then
cos( d1, d2 ) = <d1,d2> / ||d1|| ||d2|| ,
where <d1,d2> indicates inner product or vector dot product
of vectors, d1 and d2, and || d || is the length of vector d.

● Example:
d1 = 3 2 0 5 0 0 0 2 0 0
d2 = 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2
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 <d1, d2> = 3*1 + 2*0 + 0*0 + 5*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 2*1 + 0*0 + 0*2 = 5
| d1 || = (3*3+2*2+0*0+5*5+0*0+0*0+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0)0.5 = (42) 0.5 = 6.481 ||

d2 || = (1*1+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+1*1+0*0+2*2) 0.5 = (6) 0.5 = 2.449

cos(d1, d2 ) = 0.3150

Correlation measures the linear relationship

between objects

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 Visually Evaluating Correlation

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 Scatter plots
showing the
similarity from
–1 to 1.

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 Drawback of Correlation

● x = (-3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3)

● y = (9, 4, 1, 0, 1, 4, 9)

yi = xi2

● mean(x) = 0, mean(y) = 4
● std(x) = 2.16, std(y) = 3.74
● corr = (-3)(5)+(-2)(0)+(-1)(-3)+(0)(-4)+(1)(-3)+(2)(0)+3(5) / ( 6 * 2.16 * 3.74 )
=0

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If X and Y are independent, then they are also uncorrelated. However, if X and
Y are uncorrelated, then they can still be dependent.
Correlation vs Cosine vs Euclidean
Distance
● Compare the three proximity measures according to their behavior under
variable transformation
– scaling: multiplication by a value – translation: adding a constant
Property Cosine Correlation Euclidean Distance
Invariant to scaling Yes Yes No
(multiplication)
Invariant to translation No Yes No
(addition)
● Consider the example
– x = (1, 2, 4, 3, 0, 0, 0), y = (1, 2, 3, 4, 0, 0, 0)
– ys = y * 2 (scaled version of y), yt = y + 5 (translated version)
Measure (x , y) (x , ys) (x , yt)
Cosine 0.9667 0.9667 0.7940

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 Correlation 0.9429 0.9429 0.9429

Euclidean Distance 1.4142 5.8310 14.2127

Correlation vs cosine vs Euclidean

distance

● Choice of the right proximity measure depends on the domain

● What is the correct choice of proximity measure for the
following situations?
– Comparing documents using the frequencies of words
◆ Documents are considered similar if the word frequencies are similar

– Comparing the temperature in Celsius of two locations

◆ Two locations are considered similar if the temperatures are similar in
magnitude

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 – Comparing two time series of temperature measured in Celsius
◆ Two time series are considered similar if their “shape” is similar, i.e., they vary
in the same way over time, achieving minimums and maximums at similar
times, etc.

Information Based Measures

● Information theory is a well-developed and

fundamental disciple with broad applications

● Some similarity measures are based on

information theory
– Mutual information in various versions

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 – Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) and related
measures
– General and can handle non-linear relationships
– Can be complicated and time intensive to compute
Information and Probability

● Information relates to possible outcomes of an event

– transmission of a message, flip of a coin, or measurement

of a piece of data
● The more certain an outcome, the less information
that it contains and vice-versa

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 – For example, if a coin has two heads, then an outcome of
heads provides no information
– More quantitatively, the information is related the probability
of an outcome
◆ Thesmaller the probability of an outcome, the more information it
provides and vice-versa
– Entropy is the commonly used measure
Entropy

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 ●

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 Entropy Examples

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 ●

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 Entropy for Sample Data: Example

Hair Color Count p -plog2p

Black 75 0.75 0.3113
Brown 15 0.15 0.4105
Blond 5 0.05 0.2161
Red 0 0.00 0
Other 5 0.05 0.2161
Total 100 1.0 1.1540
Maximum entropy is log25 = 2.3219
Entropy for Sample Data

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 ●

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 Mutual Information

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 ●

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 Mutual Information Example

Student Count p Student Grade Count p -plog2p

Status Status
Undergrad 45 0.45
Undergrad A 5 0.05 0.2161
Grad 55 0.55
Undergrad B 30 0.30 0.5211
Total 100 1.00
Undergrad C 10 0.10 0.3322

Grade Count p Grad A 30 0.30 0.5211

A 35 0.35 Grad B 20 0.20 0.4644
B 50 0.50 Grad C 5 0.05 0.2161
C 15 0.15
Total 100 1.00 2.2710
Total 100 1.00
Mutual information of Student Status and Grade = 0.9928 + 1.4406 - 2.2710 = 0.1624

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 Using Weights to Combine
Similarities

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 ●

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 Data Preprocessing

● Aggregation
● Sampling
● Discretization and Binarization
● Attribute Transformation
● Dimensionality Reduction
● Feature subset selection
● Feature creation

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 Aggregation
● Combining two or more attributes (or objects) into a single
attribute (or object)
● Purpose
– Data reduction - reduce the number of attributes or objects
– Change of scale
◆ Cities aggregated into regions, states, countries, etc.
◆ Days aggregated into weeks, months, or years
– More “stable” data - aggregated data tends to have less variability

Customer Name Date Item Quantity Price

John Smith 1/1/2022 Apples 2 1.50
John Smith 1/1/2022 Bananas 1 0.50
Mary Jones 1/2/2022 Oranges 3 2.00
Mary Jones 1/2/2022 Bread 1 3.00
Mary Jones 1/2/2022 Milk 1 2.50

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 Example: Precipitation in Australia

● This example is based on precipitation in Australia

from the period 1982 to 1993.
The next slide shows
– A histogram for the standard deviation of average
monthly precipitation for 3,030 0.5◦ by 0.5◦ grid cells in
Australia, and
– A histogram for the standard deviation of the average
yearly precipitation for the same locations.
● The average yearly precipitation has less
variability than the average monthly precipitation.
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 ● All precipitation measurements (and their
standard deviations) are in centimeters.
Example: Precipitation in Australia
…

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 Variation of Precipitation in Australia

Standard Deviation of Average Standard Deviation of

Monthly Precipitation Average Yearly Precipitation
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Sampling
● Sampling is the main technique employed for data
reduction.
– It is often used for both the preliminary investigation of the
data and the final data analysis.

● Statisticians often sample because obtaining the

entire set of data of interest is too expensive or
time consuming.

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● Sampling is typically used in data mining because
processing the entire set of data of interest is too
expensive or time consuming.
Sampling …

● The key principle for effective sampling is the

following:

– Using a sample will work almost as well as using the

entire data set, if the sample is representative

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 – A sample is representative if it has approximately the
same properties (of interest) as the original set of data

8000 points 2000 Points 500 Points

Sample Size

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Types of Sampling
● Simple Random Sampling
– There is an equal probability of selecting any particular
item
– Sampling without replacement
◆ As each item is selected, it is removed from the
population
– Sampling with replacement
◆ Objects are not removed from the population as they
are selected for the sample.
◆ In sampling with replacement, the same object can
be picked up more than once
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 ● Stratified sampling
– Split the data into several partitions; then draw random
samples from each partition
Sample Size
● Whatsample size is necessary to get at least one object
from each of 10 equal-sized groups.

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Discretization

● Discretization
is the process of converting a
continuous attribute into an ordinal attribute
– A potentially infinite number of values are mapped into
a small number of categories
– Discretization is used in both unsupervised and
supervised settings

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Binarization

● Binarization maps a continuous or categorical

attribute into one or more binary variables

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Attribute Transformation
● An attribute transform is a function that maps the
entire set of values of a given attribute to a new
set of replacement values such that each old
value can be identified with one of the new values
– Simple functions: xk, log(x), ex, |x|
– Normalization
◆ Refers to various techniques to adjust to differences
among attributes in terms of frequency of
occurrence, mean, variance, range

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 ◆ Takeout unwanted, common signal, e.g.,
seasonality
– In statistics, standardization refers to subtracting off the
means and dividing by the standard deviation

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 Curse of
Dimensionality
● When dimensionality
increases, data becomes
increasingly sparse in the
space that it occupies

● Definitions of density and

distance between points,
which are critical for clustering and outlier
detection, become less

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meaningful •Randomly generate 500 points
•Compute difference between max and
min distance between any pair of
points

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 Dimensionality Reduction

● Purpose:
– Avoid curse of dimensionality
– Reduce amount of time and memory required by data
mining algorithms
– Allow data to be more easily visualized
– May help to eliminate irrelevant features or reduce
noise

● Techniques
– Principal Components Analysis (PCA)
– Singular Value Decomposition
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 – Others: supervised and non-linear techniques
Dimensionality Reduction: PCA

● Goal is to find a projection that captures the

largest amount of variation in data

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 Dimensionality Reduction: PCA

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 Feature Subset Selection
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 ● Another way to reduce dimensionality of data
● Redundant features
– Duplicate much or all of the information contained in
one or more other attributes
– Example: purchase price of a product and the
amount of sales tax paid
● Irrelevant features
– Contain no information that is useful for the data
mining task at hand
– Example: students' ID is often irrelevant to the task of
predicting students' GPA
● Many techniques developed, especially for
classification
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 Feature Creation

● Create new attributes that can capture the

important information in a data set much more
efficiently than the original attributes

● Three general methodologies:

– Feature extraction
◆ Example: extracting edges from images –
Feature construction
◆ Example: dividing mass by volume to get density
– Mapping data to new space

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 ◆ Example: Fourier and wavelet analysis

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● Fourier and wavelet transform

Frequency

Mapping Data to a New Space

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 Two Sine Waves + Noise Frequency

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