Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

— Chapter 2 —

Jiawei Han
Department of Computer Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
www.cs.uiuc.edu/~hanj
©2006 Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber, All rights reserved
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 1
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 2
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 3
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 4
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 5
 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 6

 Multi-Dimensional Measure of Data Quality

 A well-accepted multidimensional view:

 Accuracy

 Completeness

 Consistency

 Timeliness

 Believability

 Value added

 Interpretability

 Accessibility

 Broad categories:
 Intrinsic, contextual, representational, and accessibility

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 7

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 8

 Forms of Data Preprocessing

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 9

 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 10
 Mining Data Descriptive Characteristics

 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 11
 Measuring the Central Tendency


1 n x
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population): x   xi
n i 1 N
n
 Weighted arithmetic mean: w x i i
x i 1
 Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values n

w
i 1
i

 Median: A holistic measure

 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of the middle two
values otherwise
 Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data): n / 2  ( f )l
median  L1  ( )c
 Mode f median
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula: mean  mode  3  (mean  median)
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 12
 Symmetric vs. Skewed Data

 Median, mean and mode of symmetric,

positively and negatively skewed data

April 25, 2024 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, M, Q3, max
 Boxplot: ends of the box are the quartiles, median is marked, whiskers, and
plot outlier individually
 Outlier: usually, a value higher/lower than 1.5 x IQR
 Variance and standard deviation (sample: s, population: σ)
 Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)
1 n 1 n 2 1 n 1 n
1 n
s 
2

n  1 i 1
( xi  x ) 
2
[ xi  ( xi ) 2 ]
n  1 i 1 n i 1
 2

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

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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 14

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 15

 Boxplot Analysis

 Five-number summary of a distribution:

Minimum, Q1, M, 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 IRQ
 The median is marked by a line within the box
 Whiskers: two lines outside the box extend to
Minimum and Maximum

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 16

Visualization of Data Dispersion: Boxplot Analysis

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 17

 Histogram Analysis

 Graph displays of basic statistical class descriptions

 Frequency histograms

 A univariate graphical method

 Consists of a set of rectangles that reflect the counts or
frequencies of the classes present in the given data

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 19

 Quantile-Quantile (Q-Q) Plot
 Graphs the quantiles of one univariate distribution against
the corresponding quantiles of another
 Allows the user to view whether there is a shift in going
from one distribution to another

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 21

 Loess Curve
 Adds a smooth curve to a scatter plot in order to
provide better perception of the pattern of dependence
 Loess curve is fitted by setting two parameters: a
smoothing parameter, and the degree of the
polynomials that are fitted by the regression

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 22

 Positively and Negatively Correlated Data

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 23

 Not Correlated Data

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 24

 Graphic Displays of Basic Statistical Descriptions

 Histogram: (shown before)

 Boxplot: (covered before)
 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
 Loess (local regression) curve: add a smooth curve to a
scatter plot to provide better perception of the pattern of
dependence
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 25
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 26
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 27
 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.

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 28

 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 29
 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

 Other data problems which requires data cleaning

 duplicate records

 incomplete data

 inconsistent data

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 30

 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)

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 31

 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
 Managing categorical attributes can be tricky
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 32
 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 33
 Regression

Y1

Y1’ y=x+1

X1 x

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 34

 Cluster Analysis

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 35

 Data Cleaning as a Process
 Data discrepancy detection
 Use metadata (e.g., domain, range, dependency, distribution)

 Check field overloading

 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)
 Data migration and integration
 Data migration tools: allow transformations to be specified

 ETL (Extraction/Transformation/Loading) tools: allow users to

specify transformations through a graphical user interface

 Integration of the two processes
 Iterative and interactive (e.g., Potter’s Wheels)

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 36

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 37

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 38

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 39

 Correlation Analysis (Numerical Data)

 Correlation coefficient (also called Pearson’s product

moment coefficient)

rA, B 
 ( A  A)( B  B )  ( AB )  n A B

( n  1)AB ( n  1)AB

where n is the number of tuples, A and B 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 40
 Correlation Analysis (Categorical Data)

 Χ2 (chi-square) test
(Observed  Expected ) 2
2  
Expected
 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 41

 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)
( 250  90) 2
(50  210) 2
( 200  360) 2
(1000  840) 2
2      507.93
90 210 360 840
 It shows that like_science_fiction and play_chess are
correlated in the group
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 42
 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 43

 Data Transformation: Normalization
 Min-max normalization: to [new_minA, new_maxA]
v  minA
v'  (new _ maxA  new _ minA)  new _ minA
maxA  minA
 Ex. Let income range $12,000 to $98,000 normalized to [0.0,
73,600  12,000
1.0]. Then $73,600 is mapped to 98,000  12,000 (1.0  0)  0  0.716
 Z-score normalization (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation):
v  A
v' 
 A

73,600  54,000
 1.225
 Ex. Let μ = 54,000, σ = 16,000. Then 16,000
 Normalization by decimal scaling
v
v'  j Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(|ν’|) < 1
10
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 44
 Suppose that the recorded values of A range from −986 to
917. The maximum absolute value of A is 986. To normalize
by decimal scaling, we therefore divide each value by 1,000
(i.e., j = 3) so that −986 normalizes to −0.986 and 917
normalizes to 0.917.

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 45

 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 46

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 47

 Data Cube Aggregation

 The lowest level of a data cube (base cuboid)

 The aggregated data for an individual entity of interest
 E.g., a customer in a phone calling data warehouse
 Multiple levels of aggregation in data cubes
 Further reduce the size of data to deal with
 Reference appropriate levels
 Use the smallest representation which is enough to
solve the task
 Queries regarding aggregated information should be
answered using data cube, when possible
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 48
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 49
 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 50

 Example of Decision Tree Induction

Initial attribute set:

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

A4 ?
Y N

A1? A6?

Y N Y N

Class 1 Class 2 Class 1 Class 2

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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 51

 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

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 52

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 53
 Dimensionality Reduction:
Wavelet Transformation
Haar2 Daubechie4
 Discrete wavelet transform (DWT): linear signal
processing, multi-resolutional analysis
 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 0’s, 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
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 56
 DWT for Image Compression
 Image

Low Pass High Pass

Low Pass High Pass

Low Pass High Pass

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 57

 Wavelets: A math tool for space-efficient hierarchical
decomposition of functions.

S = [2, 2, 0, 2, 3, 5, 4, 4] can be transformed to S’ = [2 3/4 ,

-1 1/4 , 1/2 , 0, 0, -1, -1, 0]

Compression: many small detail coefficients can be replaced

by 0’s, and only the significant coefficients are retained

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 58

 Dimensionality Reduction: Principal
Component Analysis (PCA)
 Given N data vectors from n-dimensions, find k ≤ n orthogonal
vectors (principal components) that can be best used to represent data
 Steps
 Normalize input data: Each attribute falls within the same range

 Compute k orthonormal (unit) vectors, i.e., principal components

 Each input data (vector) is a linear combination of the k principal

component vectors
 The principal components are sorted in order of decreasing

“significance” or strength
 Since the components are sorted, the size of the data can be

reduced by eliminating the weak components, i.e., those with low

variance. (i.e., using the strongest principal components, it is
possible to reconstruct a good approximation of the original data
 Works for numeric data only
 Used when the number of dimensions is large
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 59
Find a projection that captures the largest amount of variation
in data The original data are projected onto a much smaller
space, resulting in dimensionality reduction. We find the
eigenvectors of the covariance matrix, and these eigenvectors
define the new space

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 60

 Principal Component Analysis

X2

Y1
Y2

X1

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 61

 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)
 Example: Log-linear models—obtain value at a point

in m-D space as the product on appropriate marginal

subspaces
 Non-parametric methods
 Do not assume models

 Major families: histograms, clustering, sampling

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 62

 Data Reduction Method (1):
Regression and Log-Linear 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 63

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
 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 acad bcd
 Data Reduction Method (2): Histograms

 Divide data into buckets and store 40

average (sum) for each bucket
35
 Partitioning rules:
30
 Equal-width: equal bucket range
25
 Equal-frequency (or equal-
depth) 20
 V-optimal: with the least 15
histogram variance (weighted 10
sum of the original values that
each bucket represents) 5
 MaxDiff: set bucket boundary 0
between each pair for pairs have
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
70000
80000
90000
100000
the β–1 largest differences
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 65
1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 8, 8, 10, 10, 10, 10, 12, 14, 14, 14, 15, 15,
15, 15, 15, 15, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 18, 20, 20, 20, 20,
20, 20, 20, 21, 21, 21, 21, 25, 25, 25, 25, 25, 28, 28, 30, 30,
30.

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April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 67
 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”
 Can have hierarchical clustering and be stored in multi-dimensional
index tree structures
 There are many choices of clustering definitions and clustering
algorithms
 Cluster analysis will be studied in depth in Chapter 7

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 68

 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

 Note: Sampling may not reduce database I/Os (page at a

time)
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 69
 Simple random sampling: There is an equal probability of
selecting any particular item

Sampling without replacement: Once an object is selected,

it is removed from the population

Sampling with replacement: A selected object is not

removed from the population

Stratified sampling: Partition the data set, and draw

samples from each partition (proportionally, i.e.,
approximately the same percentage of the data)

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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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 76

 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
 Prepare for further analysis

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 77

 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)

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 78

 Discretization and Concept Hierarchy
Generation for Numeric Data
 Typical methods: All the methods can be applied recursively
 Binning (covered above)
 Top-down split, unsupervised,
 Histogram analysis (covered above)
 Top-down split, unsupervised
 Clustering analysis (covered above)
 Either top-down split or bottom-up merge, unsupervised
 Entropy-based discretization: supervised, top-down split
 Interval merging by 2 Analysis: unsupervised, bottom-up merge
 Segmentation by natural partitioning: top-down split, unsupervised

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 79

 Binning

 Transforms numerical variables into categorical

counterparts but do not use the target (class)
information.
 Equal Width
 Equal Frequency

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 80

 Equal Width Binning

 The algorithm divides the data into k intervals of

equal size.
 The width of intervals is: w=(max-min)/k
 The interval boundaries are: min+w, min+2w,….,
min+(k-1)w

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 81

 Equal Frequency Binning

 The algorithm divides the data into k groups

where each group contains approximately same
number of values.

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April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 83
 Entropy-Based Discretization

 Entropy based method uses a split approach.

 The entropy (or the information content) is
calculated based on the class label.
 Intuitively, it finds the best split so that the bins
are as pure as possible (the majority of the
values in a bin correspond to have the same class
label).
 It is characterized by finding the spilt with the
maximal information gain.

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 84

 Entropy-Based Discretization
 Given a set of samples S, if S is partitioned into two intervals S1 and S2
using boundary T, the information gain after partitioning is
| S1 | |S |
I (S , T )  Entropy ( S 1)  2 Entropy ( S 2)
|S| |S|
 Entropy is calculated based on class distribution of the samples in the
set. Given m classes, the entropy ofmS1 is
Entropy ( S1 )   pi log 2 ( pi )
i 1

where pi is the probability of class i in S1

 The boundary that minimizes the entropy function over all possible
boundaries is selected as a binary discretization
 The process is recursively applied to partitions obtained until some
stopping criterion is met
 Such a boundary may reduce data size and improve classification
accuracy
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April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 86
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April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 90
 Interval Merge by 2 Analysis
 Merging-based (bottom-up) vs. splitting-based methods
 Merge: Find the best neighboring intervals and merge them to form
larger intervals recursively
 ChiMerge [Kerber AAAI 1992, See also Liu et al. DMKD 2002]
 Initially, each distinct value of a numerical attr. A is considered to be
one interval
 2 tests are performed for every pair of adjacent intervals
 Adjacent intervals with the least 2 values are merged together,
since low 2 values for a pair indicate similar class distributions
 This merge process proceeds recursively until a predefined stopping
criterion is met (such as significance level, max-interval, max
inconsistency, etc.)
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 91
 Segmentation by Natural Partitioning

 A simply 3-4-5 rule can be used to segment numeric data

into relatively uniform, “natural” intervals.
 If an interval covers 3, 6, 7 or 9 distinct values at the
most significant digit, partition the range into 3 equi-
width intervals
 If it covers 2, 4, or 8 distinct values at the most
significant digit, partition the range into 4 intervals
 If it covers 1, 5, or 10 distinct values at the most
significant digit, partition the range into 5 intervals

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 92

  Suppose that profits at different branches of AllElectronics
for the year 2004 cover a wide range, from −$351,976.00
to $4,700,896.50. A user desires the automatic
generation of a concept hierarchy for profit. Let (−
$1,000,000...$0] denotes the range from −$1,000,000
(exclusive) to $0 (inclusive). Suppose that the data within
the 5th percentile and 95th percentile are between −
$159,876 and $1,838,761.

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 93

  1. Based on the above information, the minimum and maximum
values are MIN = −$351,976.00, and MAX = $4,700,896.50. The low
(5th percentile) and high (95th percentile) values to be considered
for the top or first level of discretization are LOW = −$159,876, and
HIGH = $1,838,761.
 2. Given LOW and HIGH, the most significant digit (msd) is at the
million dollar digit position (i.e., msd = 1,000,000). Rounding LOW
down to the million dollar digit, we get LOW’ = −$1,000,000;
rounding HIGH up to the million dollar digit, we get HIGH’ = +
$2,000,000.
 3. Since this interval ranges over three distinct values at the most
significant digit, that is, (2,000,000−(−1,000,000))/1,000,000 = 3,
the segment is partitioned into three equal-width subsegments
according to the 3-4-5 rule: (−$1,000,000...$0], ($0...$1,000,000],
and ($1,000,000...$2,000,000]. This represents the top tier of the
hierarchy.
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 94
  4. We now examine the MIN and MAX values to see how they “fit”
into the first-level partitions. Since the first interval (−
$1,000,000...$0] covers the MIN value, that is, LOW’ < MIN, we can
adjust the left boundary of this interval to make the interval smaller.
The most significant digit of MIN is the hundred thousand digit
position.
 Rounding MIN down to this position, we get MIN’ = −$400,000.
Therefore, the first interval is redefined as (−$400,000...0]. Since the
last interval, ($1,000,000...$2,000,000], does not cover the MAX
value, that is, MAX > HIGH’ , we need to create a new interval to
cover it. Rounding up MAX at its most significant digit position, the
new interval is ($2,000,000 ...$5,000,000]. Hence, the topmost level
of the hierarchy contains four partitions, (−$400,000...$0],
($0...$1,000,000], ($1,000,000...$2,000,000], and
($2,000,000...$5,000,000].

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 95

  5. Recursively, each interval can be further partitioned according to
the 3-4-5 rule to form the next lower level of the hierarchy: The first
interval, (−$400,000. . . $0], is partitioned into 4 subintervals: (−
$400,000. . .−$300,000], (−$300,000. . .−$200,000],(−$200,000. . .
−$100,000], and (−$100,000. . . $0]. The second interval, ($0. . .
$1,000,000], is partitioned into 5 subintervals: ($0... $200,000],
($200,000. . . $400,000],($400,000. . . $600,000],($600,000. . .
$800,000], and ($800,000. . . $1,000,000]. The third interval,
($1,000,000. . . $2,000,000], is partitioned into 5 subintervals:
($1,000,000. . . $1,200,000],($1,200,000. . . $1,400,000],
($1,400,000. . . $1,600,000], ($1,600,000 . . . $1,800,000], and
($1,800,000 . . . $2,000,000]. The last interval, ($2,000,000. . .
$5,000,000], is partitioned into 3 subintervals: ($2,000,000. . .
$3,000,000], ($3,000,000. . . $4,000,000], and ($4,000,000 . . .
$5,000,000]. Similarly, the 3-4-5 rule can be carried on iteratively at
deeper levels, as necessary.
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 96
 Example of 3-4-5 Rule
count

Step 1: -$351 -$159 profit $1,838 $4,700

Min Low (i.e, 5%-tile) High(i.e, 95%-0 tile) Max
Step 2: msd=1,000 Low=-$1,000 High=$2,000

(-$1,000 - $2,000)
Step 3:

(-$1,000 - 0) (0 -$ 1,000) ($1,000 - $2,000)

(-$400 -$5,000)
Step 4:

(-$400 - 0) ($2,000 - $5, 000)

(0 - $1,000) ($1,000 - $2, 000)
(0 -
(-$400 - ($1,000 -
$200)
$1,200) ($2,000 -
-$300)
($200 - $3,000)
($1,200 -
(-$300 - $400)
$1,400)
-$200) ($3,000 -
($400 - ($1,400 - $4,000)
(-$200 - $600) $1,600) ($4,000 -
-$100) $5,000)
($600 - ($1,600 -
$800) ($800 - ($1,800 -
$1,800)
(-$100 - $1,000) $2,000)
0)
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 97
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
 {Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba} ⊂ prairies Canada and {British
Columbia, prairies Canada} ⊂ Western Canada.
 {Urbana, Champaign, Chicago} < Illinois
 Specification of only a partial set of attributes
 E.g., only street < city, not others
 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}

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 98

 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

April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 99
 Chapter 2: Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 100
 Summary
 Data preparation or preprocessing is a big issue for both
data warehousing and data mining
 Discriptive data summarization is need for quality data
preprocessing
 Data preparation includes
 Data cleaning and data integration
 Data reduction and feature selection
 Discretization
 A lot a methods have been developed but data
preprocessing still an active area of research
April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 101
 References
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 D. Pyle. Data Preparation for Data Mining. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999
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April 25, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 103