CPSC 4830

Data Mining for Data Analytics

Lecture 2
Lecture 2
Note that for a real machine learning project, 70% of the time is working on how to collect the data and
sending it back to the office, 20% of the time is data pre-processing, 10% is modelling, validation and deploy
Data Objects and Attribute Types
Record
Relational records
Data matrix, e.g., numerical matrix,
crosstabs
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
Temporal data: time-series
Sequential Data: transaction sequences
Genetic sequence data
Spatial, image and multimedia:
Spatial data: maps
Image data:
Video data:
Data Objects and Attribute Types
Data sets are made up of data objects. OR you can think it refers to ROW
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.
Data Objects and Attribute Types
Attribute (or dimensions, features, variables): a data field, representing a characteristic or feature of a data
object. OR you think it refers to COLUMN
E.g., customer _ID, name, address
Types:
Nominal
Binary
Numeric: quantitative
Interval-scaled
Ratio-scaled
Data Objects and 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
Data Objects and 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 years or 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
Data Objects and Attribute Types
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
Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
Motivation
To better understand the data: central tendency, variation and spread
To see if we need to do Data Transformation before building models
Remember: Rubbish in, Rubbish out
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
Central Tendancy
Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population):
Note: n is sample size and N is population size.
Weighted arithmetic mean:
Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values
Median:
Middle value if odd number of values, or average of
the middle two values otherwise
Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data):
Mode
Value that occurs most frequently in the data
Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
Empirical formula:
mean−mode = 3×(mean−median)
Symmetry or Asymmetry
Median, mean and mode of symmetric, positively and negatively skewed data
Disperson
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 (depends on the real case)
Variance and standard deviation (sample: s, population: σ)
Variance: (algebraic, scalable computation)

Standard deviation s (or σ) is the square root of variance s square (or σ square)
Normal Distribution properties
The normal (distribution) curve, measurements (μ: mean, σ: standard deviation)
From μ–σ to μ+σ: contains about 68% of the
From μ–2σ to μ+2σ: contains about 95% of it
From μ–3σ to μ+3σ: contains about 99.7% of it
Basic Graphs to study the attribute distribution
Boxplot: graphic display of five-number summary
Histogram: x-axis are values, y-axis represent frequencies
Quantile plot: each value xi is paired with fi indicating that approximately 100 fi % of data are ≤ xi (seldom
use this, and we directly use q-q plot)
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
Basic Graphs to study the attribute distribution
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
Basic Graphs to study the attribute distribution
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 xi data sorted in increasing order, fi indicates that approximately 100 fi% of the data are below or
equal to the value xi
Basic Graphs to study the attribute distribution
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.
Basic Graphs to study the attribute distribution
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
Note: the right most means they are related but not in a linear relationship
Standardization of data
Z-score:

x: raw score to be standardized, μ: mean of the population, σ: 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

where m is the mean of x

standardized measure (z-score):

Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using standard deviation
Measuring Distance and Similarity
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
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Visual Similarity
Classification
Is it a horse?
Image Retrieval
Show me pictures of horses.
Unsupervised segmentation
Which parts of the image are grass?
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Dissimilarity (e.g., distance)
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Dissimilarity (e.g., distance)
Bin-by-Bin or Pixel by Pixel
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Dissimilarity (e.g., distance)
Bin-by-Bin or Pixel by Pixel
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Dissimilarity, Difference between Distance and Divergence
Distance has to fulfill 4 laws:
1.d(x,x) = 0
2.If x<>y, d(x,y) > 0
3.d(x,y) = d(y,x)
4.d(x,z) <= d(x,y) + d(y,z) (triangle inequality)

Divergence means it cannot fulfil some of the rules above (rule 3 and 4), but can still be used to measure the
dissimilarity
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Dissimilarity (e.g., distance)
Heuristic
Minkowski-form
Weighted-Mean-Variance (WMV)
Nonparametric test statistics
χ 2 (Chi Square)
Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS)
Cramer/von Mises (CvM)
Information-theory divergences
Kullback-Liebler (KL)
Jeffrey-divergence (JD)
Ground distance measures
Histogram intersection
Quadratic form (QF)
Earth Movers Distance (EMD)
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Minkowski-form distance Lp

Special cases:
L1: absolute, cityblock, or Manhattan distance
L2: Euclidian distance
L∞: Maximum value distance
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Minkowski-form distance Lp

p = 1: Manhattan (city block, L1 norm) distance

E.g., the Hamming distance: the number of bits that are different between two binary vectors

p = 2: (L2 norm) Euclidean distance

p → ∞. “supremum” (Lmax norm, L∞ norm) distance.

This is the maximum difference between any component (attribute) of the vectors
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Example
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Weighted-Mean-Variance
Only includes minimal information about the distribution
Measuring Distance and Similarity
Examples
Measuring Distance and Similarity
It depends on applications
Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
Data matrix
n data points with p dimensions
Two modes
Dissimilarity matrix
n data points, but registers only the distance
A triangular matrix
Single mode
Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
Example
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

Method 2: Use a large number of binary attributes

creating a new binary attribute for each of the nominal states
Proximity Measure for Nominal Attributes
A contingency table for binary data
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”:

Proximity Measure for Nominal Attributes
Example:

Gender is a symmetric attribute

The remaining attributes are asymmetric binary
Let the values Y and P be 1, and the value N 0
Measure for Ordinal Attributes
An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous
Order is important, e.g., rank
Can be treated like interval-scaled
replace xif by their rank

map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing i-th object in the f-th variable by

compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval-scaled variables

Measure for Ordinal Attributes
A database may contain all attribute types
Nominal, symmetric binary, asymmetric binary, numeric, ordinal
One may use a weighted formula to combine their effects

f is binary or nominal:
d = 0 if same, otherwise 1
f is numeric:
Use the normalized distance
f is ordinal:
Compute ranks rif and treat zif as interval
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
Here we are measuring the angle size between 2 vectors as the similarity
Cosine Similarity
Take home messages
• Data attribute types: nominal, binary, ordinal, interval-scaled, ratioscaled
• 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.