Data Mining and Data

Warehousing

CSPC-308

Faculty-Dr Aruna Malik

Data Preprocessing
 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

■ Why preprocess the data?

■ Descriptive data summarization
■ Data cleaning
■ Data integration and transformation
■ Data reduction
■ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
■ Summary

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques * 2

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

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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

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 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

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 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

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 Forms of Data Preprocessing

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 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

■ Why preprocess the data?

■ Descriptive data summarization
■ Data cleaning
■ Data integration and transformation
■ Data reduction
■ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
■ Summary

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques * 9

 Data Cleaning

• 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
• 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

■ Missing data may need to be inferred.

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 Customer Data

Name Age Sex Income Class

Mike 40 Male 150k Big spender
Jenny 20 Female ? Regular
…

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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 + 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 (e.g., predict my age based on the info at my web site?)

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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

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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

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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

18
Clustering

19
 Data Cleaning as a Process
■ Data discrepancy detection
■ Use metadata (e.g., domain, range, dependency, distribution) (How
many people are there in Nebraska?)
■ Check uniqueness rule, consecutive rule and null rule
■ Use commercial tools
■ Data scrubbing: use simple domain knowledge (e.g., postal code,
spell-check) to detect errors and make corrections
■ Data auditing: by analyzing data to discover rules and relationship to
detect violators (e.g., correlation and clustering to find outliers)

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 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

■ Why preprocess the data?

■ Data cleaning
■ Data integration and transformation
■ Data reduction
■ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
■ Summary

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 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 (e.g., GPA in US and China)

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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 quality

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 Correlation Analysis (Numerical Data)

• Correlation coefficient (also called Pearson’s product moment

coefficient)

where n is the number of tuples, and 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 correlated
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and Techniques24
Correlation Analysis (Categorical Data)

• Χ2 (chi-square) test (Example: Grade and Sex)

• 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

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 Chi-Square Calculation: An Example

Play chess Not play chess Sum (row)

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

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

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)

• It shows that like_science_fiction and play_chess are correlated

in the group
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and Techniques26
 Data Transformation

■ Smoothing: remove noise from data

■ Aggregation: summarization
■ 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]

– Ex. Let income range $12,000 to $98,000 normalized to [0.0, 1.0].

Then $73,000 is mapped to
• Z-score normalization (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation):

– Ex. Let μ = 54,000, σ = 16,000. Then

• Normalization by decimal scaling

Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1

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and Techniques28
 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

■ Why preprocess the data?

■ Data cleaning
■ Data integration and transformation
■ Data reduction
■ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
■ Summary

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques * 29

 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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 Data Cube Aggregation

■ The lowest level of a data cube (base

cuboid)
■ The aggregated data for an
individual entity of interest
■ Multiple levels of aggregation in data
cubes
■ Further reduce the size of data to
deal with

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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
■ Heuristic methods (due to exponential # of choices):
■ Step-wise forward selection
■ Step-wise backward elimination
■ Combining forward selection and backward elimination
■ Decision-tree induction
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Attribute Subset Selection

33
*

Example of Decision Tree Induction

Initial attribute set:

{A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6}

A4 ? Loan Approval
Example:
Salary, Credit
A1? A6? Score, House,
Monthly payment,
Age
Class 2 Class 1 Class 2
Class 1

> Reduced attribute set: {A1, A4, A6}

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 Heuristic Feature Selection Methods

■ 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 (how?)
■ Best step-wise feature selection:
■ The best single-feature is picked first
■ Then next best feature condition to the first, ...
■ Step-wise feature elimination:
■ Repeatedly eliminate the worst feature
■ Best combined feature selection and elimination
■ Optimal branch and bound:
■ Use feature elimination and backtracking

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 Data Compression

■ String compression
■ There are extensive theories and well-tuned algorithms (e.g.,
Huffman encoding algorithm)
■ Typically lossless
■ But only limited manipulation is possible without expansion
■ Audio/video compression
■ Typically lossy compression, with progressive refinement
■ Sometimes small fragments of signal can be reconstructed
without reconstructing the whole
■ Time sequence is not audio
■ Typically short and vary slowly with time
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 Data Compression

Original Data Compressed

Data

lossless

s s y
lo
Original Data
Approximated

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 Numerosity Reduction

■ Reduce data volume by choosing alternative, smaller forms of

data representation
■ Parametric methods
■ Assume the data fits some model, estimate model
parameters, store only the parameters, and discard the
data (except possible outliers)

■ Non-parametric methods
■ Do not assume models
■ Major families: histograms, clustering, sampling
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 Data Reduction Method (1): Regression
Models

■ Linear regression: Data are modeled to fit a straight line

■ Often uses the least-square method to fit the line

■ Multiple regression: allows a response variable Y to be

modeled as a linear function of multidimensional feature
vector

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Regress Analysis and Log-Linear Models

• Linear regression: Y = w X + b
– Two regression coefficients, w and b, specify the line and
are to be estimated by using the data at hand
– Using the least squares criterion to the known values of Y1,
Y2, …, X1, X2, ….
• Multiple regression: Y = b0 + b1 X1 + b2 X2.
– Many nonlinear functions can be transformed into the
above
 Data Reduction Method (2): Histograms

■ Divide data into buckets and store

average (sum) for each bucket
■ Partitioning rules:
■ Equal-width: equal bucket range
■ Equal-frequency (or equal-depth)

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Data Reduction Method (3): 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”
• There are many choices of clustering definitions and clustering algorithms
• Cluster analysis will be studied in depth in Chapter 7

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 Data Reduction Method (4): 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

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*

Sampling: with or without Replacement

W O R
SRS le random
i m p h ou t
(s e wi t
p l
sam ment)
p l a ce
re

SRSW
R

Raw Data
Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 44
Sampling: Cluster or Stratified Sampling

Raw Data Cluster/Stratified Sample

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 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

■ Why preprocess the data?

■ Data cleaning
■ Data integration and transformation
■ Data reduction
■ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
■ Summary

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques * 46

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

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 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 level concepts (such as young,
middle-aged, or senior)

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 Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
Generation for Numeric Data
■ Typical methods: All the methods can be applied recursively
■ Binning
■ Top-down split, unsupervised,
■ Histogram analysis
■ Top-down split, unsupervised
■ Clustering analysis
■ Either top-down split or bottom-up merge, unsupervised
■ Entropy-based discretization: supervised, top-down split
■ Interval merging by χ2 Analysis: supervised, bottom-up merge

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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
■ 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, country}

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 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

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques * 51