Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

— Chapter 2 —

Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber, and Pei. All rights reserved.
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 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

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 Types of Data Sets
 Record
 Relational records
 Data matrix, e.g., numerical matrix
 Document data: text documents:
Term-frequency vector
 Transaction data
 Graph and network
 World Wide Web
 Social or information networks
 Molecular Structures
 Ordered
 Video data: sequence of images TID Items
 Temporal data: time-series 1 Bread, Coke, Milk
 Sequential Data: transaction sequences 2 Butter, Bread
 Genetic sequence data 3 Butter, Coke, Cookies, Milk
 Spatial, image and multimedia: 4 Butter, Bread, Cookies, Milk
 Spatial data: maps
5 Coke, Cookies, Milk
 Image data
 Video data

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Important Characteristics of Structured Data

 Dimensionality
 Curse of dimensionality
 Sparsity
 Only presence counts
 Distribution
 Centrality and dispersion

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 Data Objects

 Data sets are made up of data objects.

 A data object represents an entity.
 Examples:
 sales database: customers, store items, sales
 medical database: patients, treatments
 university database: students, professors, courses
 Also called samples , examples, instances, data points,
objects, tuples.
 Data objects are described by attributes.
 Database rows -> data objects; columns ->attributes.
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 Attributes

 Attribute (or dimensions, features, variables):

a data field, representing a characteristic or feature
of a data object.
 E.g., customer _ID, name, address
 Types:
 Nominal

 Binary

 Numeric: quantitative

 Interval-scaled

 Ratio-scaled

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 Attribute Types
 Nominal: categories, states, or “names of things”
 Hair_color = {auburn, black, blond, brown, grey, red, white}
 marital status, occupation, ID numbers, zip codes
 Binary
 Nominal attribute with only 2 states (0 and 1)
 Symmetric binary: both outcomes equally important
 e.g., gender
 Asymmetric binary: outcomes not equally important.
 e.g., medical test (positive vs. negative)
 Convention: assign 1 to most important outcome (e.g., HIV
positive)
 Ordinal
 Values have a meaningful order (ranking) but magnitude between
successive values is not known.
 Size = {small, medium, large}, grades, army rankings

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 Numeric Attribute Types
 Quantity (integer or real-valued)
 Interval
 Measured on a scale of equal-sized units
 Values have order
 E.g., temperature in C˚or F˚, calendar dates
 No true zero-point
 Ratio
 Inherent zero-point
 We can speak of values as being an order of
magnitude larger than the unit of measurement
(10 K˚ is twice as high as 5 K˚).
 e.g., temperature in Kelvin, length, counts,
monetary quantities
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 Discrete vs. Continuous Attributes
 Discrete Attribute
 Has only a finite or countably infinite set of values

 E.g., zip codes, profession, or the set of words in a

collection of documents
 Sometimes, represented as integer variables

 Note: Binary attributes are a special case of discrete

attributes

 Continuous Attribute
 Has real numbers as attribute values

 E.g., temperature, height, or weight

 Continuous attributes are typically represented as

floating-point variables
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Example: Family Car Data
Attributes / Features labels

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 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

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 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
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 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population):
Note: n is sample size and N is population size.
 Weighted arithmetic mean:
x 
1

n
xi   x
n n i 1 N
wx i i
x  i 1
n

w
i 1
i
 Median:
 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of the middle two values
otherwise
 Mode
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula: mean  mode  3  (mean  median)
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 Symmetric vs. Skewed Data

 Median, mean and mode of symmetric

symmetric, positively and
negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

February 17, 2025 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 14

 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 by a line
within the box; add two lines , and plot outliers individually
 Outlier: usually, a value higher/lower than 1.5 x IQR the 3rd / 1 st quartile
 Variance and standard deviation (sample: s, population: σ)
 Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)
1 n 1 n 2 1 n 2 1 n
1 n
s 
2

n 1 i1
(xi  x) 
2
[ xi  ( xi ) ]
n 1 i1 n i1
 
2

N

i 1
( x i  
2
) 
N
 xi   2
i 1
2

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

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 Sample Variance – Unbiased estimator
 Variance calculated with the n-1 correlation tends to approach the true variance
at large sample size, meaning it is unbiased.

Khanacademy.org
 Quartiles
 A plot of the data distribution for some attribute X. The
quantiles plotted are quartiles. The three quartiles divide
the distribution into four equal-size consecutive subsets.

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 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

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 Boxplots
 Boxplot for the unit price data for items sold at four branches of
AllElectronics during a given time period.

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 Exercise
 Find the median, quartiles, and interquartile range for the
following 19 samples:

10, 5, 7, 23, 24, 15, 24, 19, 21, 25, 21, 22, 22, 23, 24, 23, 24, 23, 23

 How many data points can we say are outliers?

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 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

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Outlier Detection: idea from a paper

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