Concepts and

Techniques
Chapter 2

Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Simon Fraser University
2013 Han, Kamber, and Pei. All rights
reserved.
1

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your

Data

Data Objects and Attribute Types

Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

Data Visualization

Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

Summary

Types of Data Sets

Record

Relational records

Data matrix, e.g., numerical matrix,

crosstabs

Document data: text documents: termfrequency vector

Transaction data

Graph and network

World Wide Web

Social or information networks

Molecular Structures

Ordered

Video data: sequence of images

Temporal data: time-series

Sequential Data: transaction sequences

Genetic sequence data

Spatial, image and multimedia:

Spatial data: maps

Image data:

Video data:

TID

Items

1
2
3
4
5

Bread, Coke, Milk

Beer, Bread
Beer, Coke, Diaper, Milk
Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk
Coke, Diaper, Milk

Important Characteristics of
Structured Data

Dimensionality

Sparsity

Only presence counts

Resolution

Curse of dimensionality

Patterns depend on the scale

Distribution

Centrality and dispersion

4

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.

5

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
6

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

7

Numeric Attribute Types

Quantity (integer or real-valued)

Interval

Measured on a scale of equal-sized units

Values have order

E.g., temperature in Cor 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
8

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

Practically, real values can only be measured and
represented using a finite number of digits
Continuous attributes are typically represented as
floating-point variables
9

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your

Data

Data Objects and Attribute Types

Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

Data Visualization

Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

Summary

10

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
11

Measuring the Central Tendency

Note: n is sample size and N is population size.

1 n
x xi
n i 1

Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population):

Weighted arithmetic mean:

Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values

Median:

w x
i 1
n

Middle value if odd number of values, or average

i 1

of the middle two values otherwise

Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data):

Mode

median L1 (

n / 2 ( freq ) l
freq

) width

median in the data

Value that occurs most frequently

Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal

Empirical formula:

Media
n
interv
al

mean mode 3 (mean median)

12

Symmetric vs.
Skewed Data

Median, mean and mode of

symmetric, positively and
negatively skewed data

positively skewed

February 19, 2016

symmetric

negatively
skewed

Data Mining: Concepts and

Techniques

13

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: )

Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)

1 n
1 n 2 1 n
2
2
s
(
x

x
)

[
x

(
x
)
i
i n
i ]
n 1 i 1
n 1 i 1
i 1
2

1 n
1 n 2
2
( xi ) xi 2
N i 1
N i 1
Standard deviation s (or ) is the square root of variance s2 (or 2)
2

14

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
15

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
16

Histogram Analysis

Histogram: Graph display of

tabulated frequencies, shown as
bars

It shows what proportion of cases

fall into each of several categories

Differs from a bar chart in that it is

the area of the bar that denotes
the value, not the height as in bar
charts, a crucial distinction when
the categories are not of uniform
width

The categories are usually specified

as non-overlapping intervals of
some variable. The categories
(bars) must be adjacent
17

Histograms Often Tell More than

Boxplots

The two histograms

shown in the left
may have the same
boxplot
representation

The same values

for: min, Q1,
median, Q3, max

But they have

rather different data
distributions
18

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 x data sorted in increasing order, f
i
i
indicates that approximately 100 fi% of the data
are below or equal to the value xi

Data Mining: Concepts and

Techniques

19

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.

20

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

21

Positively and Negatively Correlated

Data

The left half fragment is positively

correlated

The right half is negative correlated

22

Uncorrelated Data

23

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your

Data

Data Objects and Attribute Types

Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

Data Visualization

Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

Summary

24

Data Visualization

Why data visualization?

Gain insight into an information space by mapping data onto
graphical primitives
Provide qualitative overview of large data sets
Search for patterns, trends, structure, irregularities,
relationships among data
Help find interesting regions and suitable parameters for
further quantitative analysis
Provide a visual proof of computer representations derived
Categorization of visualization methods:
Pixel-oriented visualization techniques
Geometric projection visualization techniques
Icon-based visualization techniques
Hierarchical visualization techniques
Visualizing complex data and relations
25

Pixel-Oriented Visualization
Techniques

For a data set of m dimensions, create m windows on the

screen, one for each dimension

The m dimension values of a record are mapped to m pixels

at the corresponding positions in the windows

The colors of the pixels reflect the corresponding values

(a) Income

(b) Credit
Limit

(c) transaction
volume

(d) age
26

Geometric Projection Visualization

Techniques

Visualization of geometric transformations and

projections of the data

Methods

Direct visualization

Scatterplot and scatterplot matrices

Landscapes

Projection pursuit technique: Help users find

meaningful projections of multidimensional data

Prosection views

Hyperslice

Parallel coordinates
27

Direct Data Visualization

Ribbons with Twists Based on Vorticity
Data Mining: Concepts and
Techniques

28

Used by ermission of M. Ward, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Scatterplot Matrices

Matrix of scatterplots (x-y-diagrams) of the k-dim. data [total of (k2/2-k) scatterplots]

29

Used by permission of B. Wright, Visible Decisions Inc.

Landscapes

news articles
visualized as
a landscape

Visualization of the data as perspective landscape

The data needs to be transformed into a (possibly artificial) 2D spatial
representation which preserves the characteristics of the data
30

Parallel Coordinates

n equidistant axes which are parallel to one of the screen axes

and correspond to the attributes
The axes are scaled to the [minimum, maximum]: range of the
corresponding attribute
Every data item corresponds to a polygonal line which
intersects each of the axes at the point which corresponds to
the value for the attribute

A tt r. 1

A t tr . 2

A ttr. 3

A t t r. k

31

Parallel Coordinates of a Data Set

32

Icon-Based Visualization
Techniques

Visualization of the data values as features of icons

Typical visualization methods

Chernoff Faces

Stick Figures

General techniques

Shape coding: Use shape to represent certain

information encoding

Color icons: Use color icons to encode more

information

Tile bars: Use small icons to represent the

relevant feature vectors in document retrieval
33

Chernoff Faces

A way to display variables on a two-dimensional surface, e.g.,

let x be eyebrow slant, y be eye size, z be nose length, etc.

The figure shows faces produced using 10 characteristics-head eccentricity, eye size, eye spacing, eye eccentricity,
pupil size, eyebrow slant, nose size, mouth shape, mouth size,
and mouth opening): Each assigned one of 10 possible
values, generated using Mathematica (S. Dickson)

REFERENCE: Gonick, L. and Smith, W.

The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. New York:
Harper Perennial, p. 212, 1993

Weisstein, Eric W. "Chernoff Face." From

MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.
mathworld.wolfram.com/ChernoffFace.html

34

Stick Figure

used by permission of G. Grinstein, University of Massachusettes at Lowell

A census
data figure
showing age,
income,
gender,
education,
etc.
A 5-piece
stick figure (1
body and 4
limbs w.
different
angle/length)
Data Mining: Concepts and
Techniques

35

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your

Data

Data Objects and Attribute Types

Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

Data Visualization

Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

Summary

36

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

37

Data Matrix and Dissimilarity

Matrix

Data matrix
n data points with
p dimensions
Two modes

x11

...

x
i1
...
x
n1

Dissimilarity matrix
n data points, but
registers only the
distance
A triangular matrix
Single mode

...

x1f

...

x1p

...

...

...

...

xif

...

...
xip

...
...
... xnf

...
...

...
xnp

d(2,1)
0

d(3,1) d ( 3,2) 0

:
:
:

d ( n,1) d ( n,2) ...

... 0
38

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

m
d (i, j) p
p of binary
Method 2: Use a large number
attributes

creating a new binary attribute for each of the

M nominal states
39

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:

40

Dissimilarity between Binary

Variables

Example
Name
Jack
Mary
Jim

Gender
M
F
M

Fever
Y
Y
Y

Cough
N
N
P

Test-1
P
P
N

Test-2
N
N
N

Test-3
N
P
N

Test-4
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
01
0.33
2 01
11
d ( jack , jim )
0.67
111
1 2
d ( jim , mary )
0.75
11 2
d ( jack , mary )

41

Standardizing Numeric Data

Z-score:

X: raw score to be standardized, : mean of the population,

: 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
1
where

s f n (| x1 f m f | | x2 f m f | ... | xnf m f |)
m f 1n (x1 f x2 f ... xnf )
x m
.

standardized measure (z-score):

zif

if

sf

Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using

standard deviation
42

Example:
Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
Data Matrix

Dissimilarity Matrix
(with Euclidean Distance)

43

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

44

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

45

Example: Minkowski Distance

Dissimilarity Matrices

Manhattan
(L1)

Euclidean (L2)

Supremum

46

Ordinal Variables

An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous

Order is important, e.g., rank

Can be treated like interval-scaled

rif {1,..., M f }
replace x
if by their rank

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
47

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 r and
if
r
if 1
zif
Treat z as interval-scaled
if
M f 1
48

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

49

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)
d1d2 = 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

50

KL Divergence: Comparing
Two Probability Distributions

The Kullback-Leibler (KD) divergence: Measure the difference

between two probability distributions over the same variable x

From information theory, closely related to relative entropy,

information divergence, and information for discrimination
DKL(p(x), q(x)): divergence of q(x) from p(x), measuring the
information lost when q(x) is used to approximate p(x)

Discrete form:
The KL divergence measures the expected number of extra bits
required to code samples from p(x) (true distribution) when
using a code based on q(x), which represents a theory, model,
description, or approximation of p(x)
Its continuous form:
The KL divergence: not a distance measure, not a metric:
asymmetric, not satisfy triangular inequality
51

How to
Compute the KL
Divergence?
Base on the formula, D (P,Q) 0 and D

KL

(P,Q) = 0 if and only if P = Q.

KL

How about when p =0 or q = 0?

lim
q0 q log q = 0
when p = 0 but q != 0, DKL(p, q) is defined as , i.e., if one event e is
possible (i.e., p(e) > 0), and the other predicts it is absolutely
impossible (i.e., q(e) = 0), then the two distributions are absolutely
different
However, in practice, P and Q are derived from frequency distributions,
not counting the possibility of unseen events. Thus smoothing is needed
Example: P : (a : 3/5, b : 1/5, c : 1/5). Q : (a : 5/9, b : 3/9, d : 1/9)
need to introduce a small constant , e.g., = 103
The sample set observed in P, SP = {a, b, c}, SQ = {a, b, d}, SU = {a,
b, c, d}
Smoothing, add missing symbols to each distribution, with probability
P : (a : 3/5 /3, b : 1/5 /3, c : 1/5 /3, d : )
Q : (a : 5/9 /3, b : 3/9 /3, c : , d : 1/9 /3).
D (P,Q) can be computed easily
KL

52

Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your

Data

Data Objects and Attribute Types

Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

Data Visualization

Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

Summary

53

Summary

Data attribute types: nominal, binary, ordinal, intervalscaled, ratio-scaled

Many types of data sets, e.g., numerical, text, graph,
Web, image.
Gain insight into the data by:
Basic statistical data description: central tendency,
dispersion, graphical displays
Data visualization: map data onto graphical
primitives
Measure data similarity
Above steps are the beginning of data preprocessing
Many methods have been developed but still an active
area of research