Types of Data & Data Preprocessing

Prof. Navneet Goyal Department of Computer Science & Information Systems BITS, Pilani

Data Preprocessing
Why preprocess the data? Data cleaning Data integration and transformation Data reduction Discretization and concept hierarchy

generation
Summary

Why Preprocess Data?

Data in the real world is dirty Incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain attributes of interest, or containing only aggregate data Noisy: containing errors or outliers Inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or names Welcome to the real world! No quality data, no quality mining results! Quality decisions must be based on quality data

Understanding Your Data

Descriptive Data summarization Foundation for data processing Central tendency: Mean, Mode, Median Data Dispersion: Quartiles, Interquartile range (IQR), Variance

Distributive Measure: sum,count,max,min Algebraic Measure: algebraic fn. On one or more distributive measure Example: average weighted average

Understanding Your Data

Mean is sensitive to extreme values Solution: Trimming For skewed data: median is a better measure (middle values of ordered set) Holistic measure: cannot be computed by data partitioning Example: median Computationally more expensive

Understanding Your Data

Mode: most frequently occurring data value Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal, multimodal No mode!! Dispersion of data: range, quartile, outliers Range=max-min kth percentile of a set of data in numerical order is the value xi having the property that k% of data values lie at or below xi Median is 50th percentile Quartiles: Q1(25th percentile), Q3 (75th percentile) Give idea about center, spread, & shape of distribution IQR = Q3 Q1 (all holistic measures)

Understanding Your Data

Outliers: single out values falling at least 1.5 x IQR above Q3 or below Q1 Which of the measures discussed so far are one or more of the data values? 5-member summary:
minimum, Q1, Median, Q3, maximum
(since Q1, Median, Q3 contain no information about the tails)

Boxplots Variance & Std. Dev. Interpret =0 & >0

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

Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing

Data reduction (sampling)
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

Forms of data preprocessing

Figure taken from Han & kamber Book: Data Mining Concepts & Techniques, 2e

Data Cleaning
Data cleaning tasks
Fill in missing values Identify outliers and smooth out noisy data Correct inconsistent data

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

not register history or changes of the data

Missing data may need to be inferred.

How to Handle Missing Data?

Ignore the tuple: usually done when class label is missing

(assuming the tasks is classificationnot effective when the

percentage of missing values per attribute varies considerably) Fill in the missing value manually: tedious + infeasible? Use a global constant to fill in the missing value: e.g., unknown, a new class?! Use the attribute mean to fill in the missing value

Use the attribute mean for all samples belonging to the same
class to fill in the missing value: smarter Use the most probable value to fill in the missing value:

inference-based such as Bayesian formula or decision tree

Noisy Data
Noise: random error or variance in a measured variable Incorrect attribute values may be due to
faulty data collection instruments data entry problems data transmission problems technology limitation inconsistency in naming convention

Other data problems which requires data cleaning

duplicate records incomplete data inconsistent data

Smooth out the data to remove noise

Smoothing Techniques
Binning method:
first sort data and partition into (equi-depth) bins then one can smooth by bin means, smooth by bin median, smooth by bin boundaries, etc.

Clustering
detect and remove outliers

Combined computer and human inspection

detect suspicious values and check by human

Regression
smooth by fitting the data into regression functions

Binning
Binning methods smooth a sorted data value by consulting its neighborhood, that is, values around it Sorted values are distributed into a number of buckets or bins Binning does local smoothing Different binning methods illustrated by an example Also used as data discretization tech.

Simple Discretization Methods: Binning

Equal-width (distance) partitioning:
It 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. Most straightforward But outliers may dominate presentation Skewed data is not handled well.
It divides the range into N intervals, each containing approximately same number of samples Good data scaling Managing categorical attributes can be tricky.

Equal-depth (frequency) partitioning:

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 (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

Regression
y
Y1

Y1

y=x+1

X1

Cluster Analysis

Data Smoothing & Reduction

Many methods discussed above for data smoothing are also methods for data reduction involving discretization For eg. Binning reduces the number of distinct values per attribute ( a form of data reduction for logic-based data mining methods such a decision tree induction

Data Integration
Data integration:
combines data from multiple sources into a coherent store

Schema integration
integrate metadata from different sources Entity identification problem: identify real world entities from multiple data sources, e.g., A.cust-id B.cust-#

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

Handling Redundant Data in Data Integration

Redundant data occur often when integration of multiple databases
The same attribute may have different names in different databases One attribute may be a derived attribute in another table, e.g., annual revenue

Redundant data may be detected by correlation analysis (Pearsons Correlation Coefficient) Correlation does not imply Causality Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may help reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and improve mining speed and quality

Data Transformation
Smoothing: remove noise from data Aggregation: summarization, data cube construction 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

Data Transformation: Normalization

min-max normalization v minA v' (new _ maxA new _ minA) new _ minA maxA minA z-score normalization (zero-mean) v meanA v' stand _ devA normalization by decimal scaling
v v' j 10
Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(| v' |)<1

Data Transformation: Attribute Construction

New attributes are constructed from given attributes and added Improves accuracy Helps in understanding of structure in higdimensional data For eg. Add area based on attributes height & width Knowing about relationships among attributes help in knowledge discovery

Data Reduction Strategies

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
Obtains a reduced representation of the data set that is much smaller in volume but yet produces the same (or almost the same) analytical results

Data reduction strategies

Data cube aggregation Attribute subset selection (feature subset selection) Dimensionality reduction Numerosity reduction Discretization and concept hierarchy generation

Data Cube Aggregation

Cube at the lowest level of abstraction base cuboid Cube at highest level of abstraction apex cuboid

Cubes are created at various levels of abstraction, depending upon the analysis task cubiods
Cube is a lattice of cuboids Data volume reduces as we move up from base to apex cubiod While doing data mining, the smallest available cuboid relevant to the given task should be used

Cube aggregation gives smaller data without loss of information necessary for the analysis task

Attribute subset selection

Also called Feature subset selection Leave out irrelevant attributes and pick only relevant attributes Difficult and time consuming process Reduces the data size by removing irrelevant or redundant attributes (dimensions)
Goal is to select a minimum set of features such that the resulting probability distribution of data classes is as close as possible to the original distribution given the values of all features Additional benefit: less attributes appear in discovered patterns, making interpretation easier

Attribute subset selection

How to select a good representative subset? For N attributes, 2N possible subsets Heuristic methods (due to exponential # of choices) Heuristic methods that explore a reduced search space are generally used Greedy algorithms Heuristic methods:
step-wise forward selection step-wise backward elimination combining forward selection and backward elimination decision-tree induction

Example of Decision Tree Induction

Initial attribute set: {A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6} A4 ? A1? A6?

Class 1
>

Class 2

Class 1

Class 2

Reduced attribute set: {A1, A4, A6}

Wavelet Transforms
Discrete wavelet transform (DWT): linear signal processing
Haar2 Daubechie4

Compressed approximation: store only a small fraction of the strongest of the wavelet coefficients Similar to discrete Fourier transform (DFT), but better lossy compression, localized in space Method:
Length, L, must be an integer power of 2 (padding with 0s, when necessary) Each transform has 2 functions: smoothing, difference Applies to pairs of data, resulting in two set of data of length L/2 Applies two functions recursively, until reaches the desired length

Figure taken from Han & kamber Book: Data Mining Concepts & Techniques, 2e

Principal Component Analysis

Given N data vectors from k-dimensions, find c <= k orthogonal vectors that can be best used to represent data
The original data set is reduced to one consisting of N data vectors on c principal components (reduced dimensions)

Each data vector is a linear combination of the c principal component vectors Works for numeric data only Used when the number of dimensions is large

Principal Component Analysis

X2 Y1 Y2

X1

Numerosity Reduction
Can we reduce the data volume by choosing alternative smaller forms of data representation? Techniques:
Parametric Non-parametric methods

Numerosity Reduction
Parametric methods
Assume the data fits some model, estimate model parameters, store only the parameters, and discard the data (except possible outliers) Log-linear models

Non-parametric methods
Do not assume models. Stores reduced representations of the data
Major families: histograms, clustering, sampling

Regression and LogLinear 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 Log-linear model: approximates discrete multidimensional probability distributions

Regress Analysis and Log-Linear Models

Linear regression: Y = + X
Two parameters , and 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.

Log-linear models:
The multi-way table of joint probabilities is approximated by a product of lower-order tables.
Probability: p(a, b, c, d) =

ab acad bcd

Histograms
40 A popular data reduction technique 35 Divide data into 30 buckets and store average (sum) for 25 each bucket 20 Can be constructed optimally in one 15 dimension using dynamic programming 10 Related to quantization 5 problems. 0
10000 30000 50000 70000 90000

Clustering
Partition data set into clusters, and one can store cluster representation only Can be very effective if data is clustered but not if data is smeared Can have hierarchical clustering and be stored in multi-dimensional index tree structures There are many choices of clustering definitions and clustering algorithms, further detailed in Chapter 8

Sampling
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 Sampling may not reduce database I/Os (page at a time).

Sampling

Raw Data

Sampling
Raw Data
Cluster/Stratified Sample