Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

(3rd ed.)

— Chapter 8 —

Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign &
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber & Pei. All rights reserved.

1
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
3
 Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning
■ Supervised learning (classification)
■ Supervision: The training data (observations,
measurements, etc.) are accompanied by labels indicating
the class of the observations
■ New data is classified based on the training set
■ Unsupervised learning (clustering)
■ The class labels of training data is unknown
■ Given a set of measurements, observations, etc. with the
aim of establishing the existence of classes or clusters in
the data
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 Prediction Problems: Classification vs.
Numeric Prediction
■ Classification
■ predicts categorical class labels (discrete or nominal)

■ classifies data (constructs a model) based on the training

set and the values (class labels) in a classifying attribute
and uses it in classifying new data
■ Numeric Prediction
■ models continuous-valued functions, i.e., predicts unknown
or missing values
■ Typical applications
■ Credit/loan approval:

■ Medical diagnosis: if a tumor is cancerous or benign

■ Fraud detection: if a transaction is fraudulent

■ Web page categorization: which category it is

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 Classification—A Two-Step Process
■ Model construction: describing a set of predetermined classes
■ Each tuple/sample is assumed to belong to a predefined class, as
determined by the class label attribute
■ The set of tuples used for model construction is training set
■ The model is represented as classification rules, decision trees, or
mathematical formulae
■ Model usage: for classifying future or unknown objects
■ Estimate accuracy of the model
■ The known label of test sample is compared with the classified

result from the model

■ Accuracy rate is the percentage of test set samples that are

correctly classified by the model

■ Test set is independent of training set (otherwise overfitting)

■ If the accuracy is acceptable, use the model to classify new data

■ Note: If the test set is used to select models, it is called validation (test) set
6
Process (1): Model Construction

Classification
Algorithms
Training
Data

Classifier
(Model)

IF rank = ‘professor’
OR years > 6
THEN tenured = ‘yes’
7
Process (2): Using the Model in Prediction

Classifier

Testing Unseen
Data Data

(Jeff, Professor, 4)

Tenured?

8
 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
9
 Decision Tree Induction: An Example
❑ Training data set: Buys_computer
❑ The data set follows an example of
Quinlan’s ID3 (Playing Tennis)
❑ Resulting tree:
age?

<=30 overcast
31..40 >40

student? yes credit rating?

no yes excellent fair

no yes no yes
10
 Algorithm for Decision Tree Induction
■ Basic algorithm (a greedy algorithm)
■ Tree is constructed in a top-down recursive

divide-and-conquer manner
■ At start, all the training examples are at the root

■ Attributes are categorical (if continuous-valued, they are

discretized in advance)
■ Examples are partitioned recursively based on selected

attributes
■ Test attributes are selected on the basis of a heuristic or

statistical measure (e.g., information gain)

■ Conditions for stopping partitioning
■ All samples for a given node belong to the same class

■ There are no remaining attributes for further partitioning –

majority voting is employed for classifying the leaf

■ There are no samples left
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 Brief Review of Entropy
■

m=2

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 Attribute Selection Measure: Information
Gain (ID3/C4.5)
■ Select the attribute with the highest information gain
■ Let pi be the probability that an arbitrary tuple in D belongs to
class Ci, estimated by |Ci, D|/|D|
■ Expected information (entropy) needed to classify a tuple in D:

■ Information needed (after using A to split D into v partitions) to

classify D:

■ Information gained by branching on attribute A

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 Attribute Selection: Information Gain
g Class P: buys_computer = “yes”
g Class N: buys_computer = “no”

means “age <=30” has 5 out of

14 samples, with 2 yes’es and 3
no’s. Hence

Similarly,

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 Computing Information-Gain for
Continuous-Valued Attributes
■ Let attribute A be a continuous-valued attribute
■ Must determine the best split point for A
■ Sort the value A in increasing order
■ Typically, the midpoint between each pair of adjacent values
is considered as a possible split point
■ (ai+ai+1)/2 is the midpoint between the values of ai and ai+1
■ The point with the minimum expected information
requirement for A is selected as the split-point for A
■ Split:
■ D1 is the set of tuples in D satisfying A ≤ split-point, and D2 is
the set of tuples in D satisfying A > split-point
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 Gain Ratio for Attribute Selection (C4.5)
■ Information gain measure is biased towards attributes with a
large number of values
■ C4.5 (a successor of ID3) uses gain ratio to overcome the
problem (normalization to information gain)

■ GainRatio(A) = Gain(A)/SplitInfo(A)
■ Ex.

■ gain_ratio(income) = 0.029/1.557 = 0.019

■ The attribute with the maximum gain ratio is selected as the
splitting attribute
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 Gini Index (CART, IBM IntelligentMiner)
■ If a data set D contains examples from n classes, gini index,
gini(D) is defined as

where pj is the relative frequency of class j in D

■ If a data set D is split on A into two subsets D1 and D2, the gini
index gini(D) is defined as

■ Reduction in Impurity:

■ The attribute provides the smallest ginisplit(D) (or the largest

reduction in impurity) is chosen to split the node (need to
enumerate all the possible splitting points for each attribute)
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 Computation of Gini Index
■ Ex. D has 9 tuples in buys_computer = “yes” and 5 in “no”

■ Suppose the attribute income partitions D into 10 in D1: {low,

medium} and 4 in D2

Gini{low,high} is 0.458; Gini{medium,high} is 0.450. Thus, split on the

{low,medium} (and {high}) since it has the lowest Gini index
■ All attributes are assumed continuous-valued
■ May need other tools, e.g., clustering, to get the possible split
values
■ Can be modified for categorical attributes
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 Comparing Attribute Selection Measures

■ The three measures, in general, return good results but

■ Information gain:
■ biased towards multivalued attributes
■ Gain ratio:
■ tends to prefer unbalanced splits in which one partition is
much smaller than the others
■ Gini index:
■ biased to multivalued attributes
■ has difficulty when # of classes is large
■ tends to favor tests that result in equal-sized partitions
and purity in both partitions
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 Other Attribute Selection Measures
■ CHAID: a popular decision tree algorithm, measure based on χ2 test for
independence
■ C-SEP: performs better than info. gain and gini index in certain cases
■ G-statistic: has a close approximation to χ2 distribution
■ MDL (Minimal Description Length) principle (i.e., the simplest solution is
preferred):
■ The best tree as the one that requires the fewest # of bits to both (1)
encode the tree, and (2) encode the exceptions to the tree
■ Multivariate splits (partition based on multiple variable combinations)
■ CART: finds multivariate splits based on a linear comb. of attrs.
■ Which attribute selection measure is the best?
■ Most give good results, none is significantly superior than others
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 Overfitting and Tree Pruning
■ Overfitting: An induced tree may overfit the training data
■ Too many branches, some may reflect anomalies due to

noise or outliers
■ Poor accuracy for unseen samples

■ Two approaches to avoid overfitting

■ Prepruning: Halt tree construction early ̵ do not split a node

if this would result in the goodness measure falling below a

threshold
■ Difficult to choose an appropriate threshold

■ Postpruning: Remove branches from a “fully grown”

tree—get a sequence of progressively pruned trees

■ Use a set of data different from the training data to

decide which is the “best pruned tree”

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 Enhancements to Basic Decision Tree Induction

■ Allow for continuous-valued attributes

■ Dynamically define new discrete-valued attributes that
partition the continuous attribute value into a discrete set of
intervals
■ Handle missing attribute values
■ Assign the most common value of the attribute
■ Assign probability to each of the possible values
■ Attribute construction
■ Create new attributes based on existing ones that are
sparsely represented
■ This reduces fragmentation, repetition, and replication

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 Classification in Large Databases
■ Classification—a classical problem extensively studied by
statisticians and machine learning researchers
■ Scalability: Classifying data sets with millions of examples and
hundreds of attributes with reasonable speed
■ Why is decision tree induction popular?
■ relatively faster learning speed (than other classification
methods)
■ convertible to simple and easy to understand classification
rules
■ can use SQL queries for accessing databases

■ comparable classification accuracy with other methods

■ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)

■ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

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 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
24
 Bayesian Classification: Why?
■ A statistical classifier: performs probabilistic prediction, i.e.,
predicts class membership probabilities
■ Foundation: Based on Bayes’ Theorem.
■ Performance: A simple Bayesian classifier, naïve Bayesian
classifier, has comparable performance with decision tree and
selected neural network classifiers
■ Incremental: Each training example can incrementally
increase/decrease the probability that a hypothesis is correct —
prior knowledge can be combined with observed data
■ Standard: Even when Bayesian methods are computationally
intractable, they can provide a standard of optimal decision
making against which other methods can be measured
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 Bayes’ Theorem: Basics
■ Total probability Theorem:

■ Bayes’ Theorem:

■ Let X be a data sample (“evidence”): class label is unknown

■ Let H be a hypothesis that X belongs to class C
■ Classification is to determine P(H|X), (i.e., posteriori probability): the
probability that the hypothesis holds given the observed data sample X
■ P(H) (prior probability): the initial probability
■ E.g., X will buy computer, regardless of age, income, …

■ P(X): probability that sample data is observed

■ P(X|H) (likelihood): the probability of observing the sample X, given that
the hypothesis holds
■ E.g., Given that X will buy computer, the prob. that X is 31..40,

medium income
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 Prediction Based on Bayes’ Theorem
■ Given training data X, posteriori probability of a hypothesis H,
P(H|X), follows the Bayes’ theorem

■ Informally, this can be viewed as

posteriori = likelihood x prior/evidence
■ Predicts X belongs to Ci iff the probability P(Ci|X) is the highest
among all the P(Ck|X) for all the k classes
■ Practical difficulty: It requires initial knowledge of many
probabilities, involving significant computational cost

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Classification Is to Derive the Maximum Posteriori
■ Let D be a training set of tuples and their associated class labels,
and each tuple is represented by an n-D attribute vector X = (x1,
x2, …, xn)
■ Suppose there are m classes C1, C2, …, Cm.
■ Classification is to derive the maximum posteriori, i.e., the
maximal P(Ci|X)
■ This can be derived from Bayes’ theorem

■ Since P(X) is constant for all classes, only

needs to be maximized

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 Naïve Bayes Classifier
■ A simplified assumption: attributes are conditionally
independent (i.e., no dependence relation between attributes):

■ This greatly reduces the computation cost: Only counts the

class distribution
■ If Ak is categorical, P(xk|Ci) is the # of tuples in Ci having value xk
for Ak divided by |Ci, D| (# of tuples of Ci in D)
■ If Ak is continous-valued, P(xk|Ci) is usually computed based on
Gaussian distribution with a mean μ and standard deviation σ

and P(xk|Ci) is

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 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Training Dataset

Class:
C1:buys_computer = ‘yes’
C2:buys_computer = ‘no’

Data to be classified:
X = (age <=30,
Income = medium,
Student = yes
Credit_rating = Fair)

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 Naïve Bayes Classifier: An Example
■ P(Ci): P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 9/14 = 0.643
P(buys_computer = “no”) = 5/14= 0.357
■ Compute P(X|Ci) for each class
P(age = “<=30” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 2/9 = 0.222
P(age = “<= 30” | buys_computer = “no”) = 3/5 = 0.6
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 4/9 = 0.444
P(income = “medium” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “yes) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(student = “yes” | buys_computer = “no”) = 1/5 = 0.2
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “yes”) = 6/9 = 0.667
P(credit_rating = “fair” | buys_computer = “no”) = 2/5 = 0.4
■ X = (age <= 30 , income = medium, student = yes, credit_rating = fair)
P(X|Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.222 x 0.444 x 0.667 x 0.667 = 0.044
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) = 0.6 x 0.4 x 0.2 x 0.4 = 0.019
P(X|Ci)*P(Ci) : P(X|buys_computer = “yes”) * P(buys_computer = “yes”) = 0.028
P(X|buys_computer = “no”) * P(buys_computer = “no”) = 0.007
Therefore, X belongs to class (“buys_computer = yes”)
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 Naïve Bayes Classifier: Comments
■ Advantages
■ Easy to implement

■ Good results obtained in most of the cases

■ Disadvantages
■ Assumption: class conditional independence, therefore loss of
accuracy
■ Practically, dependencies exist among variables

■ E.g., hospitals: patients: Profile: age, family history, etc.

Symptoms: fever, cough etc., Disease: lung cancer,

diabetes, etc.
■ Dependencies among these cannot be modeled by Naïve

Bayes Classifier
■ How to deal with these dependencies? Bayesian Belief Networks
(Chapter 9)
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 Chapter 8. Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Classification: Basic Concepts

■ Decision Tree Induction
■ Bayes Classification Methods
■ Rule-Based Classification
■ Model Evaluation and Selection
■ Techniques to Improve Classification Accuracy:
Ensemble Methods
■ Summary
33
 Summary (I)
■ Classification is a form of data analysis that extracts models
describing important data classes.
■ Effective and scalable methods have been developed for decision
tree induction, Naive Bayesian classification, rule-based
classification, and many other classification methods.
■ Evaluation metrics include: accuracy, sensitivity, specificity,
precision, recall, F measure, and Fß measure.
■ Stratified k-fold cross-validation is recommended for accuracy
estimation. Bagging and boosting can be used to increase overall
accuracy by learning and combining a series of individual models.

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 Summary (II)
■ Significance tests and ROC curves are useful for model selection.
■ There have been numerous comparisons of the different
classification methods; the matter remains a research topic
■ No single method has been found to be superior over all others
for all data sets
■ Issues such as accuracy, training time, robustness, scalability,
and interpretability must be considered and can involve
trade-offs, further complicating the quest for an overall superior
method

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 References (1)
■ C. Apte and S. Weiss. Data mining with decision trees and decision rules. Future
Generation Computer Systems, 13, 1997
■ C. M. Bishop, Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition. Oxford University Press,
1995
■ L. Breiman, J. Friedman, R. Olshen, and C. Stone. Classification and Regression Trees.
Wadsworth International Group, 1984
■ C. J. C. Burges. A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition. Data
Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 2(2): 121-168, 1998
■ P. K. Chan and S. J. Stolfo. Learning arbiter and combiner trees from partitioned data
for scaling machine learning. KDD'95
■ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and C.-W. Hsu, Discriminative Frequent Pattern Analysis for
Effective Classification, ICDE'07
■ H. Cheng, X. Yan, J. Han, and P. S. Yu, Direct Discriminative Pattern Mining for
Effective Classification, ICDE'08
■ W. Cohen. Fast effective rule induction. ICML'95
■ G. Cong, K.-L. Tan, A. K. H. Tung, and X. Xu. Mining top-k covering rule groups for
gene expression data. SIGMOD'05
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 References (2)
■ A. J. Dobson. An Introduction to Generalized Linear Models. Chapman & Hall, 1990.
■ G. Dong and J. Li. Efficient mining of emerging patterns: Discovering trends and
differences. KDD'99.
■ R. O. Duda, P. E. Hart, and D. G. Stork. Pattern Classification, 2ed. John Wiley, 2001
■ U. M. Fayyad. Branching on attribute values in decision tree generation. AAAI’94.
■ Y. Freund and R. E. Schapire. A decision-theoretic generalization of on-line learning and
an application to boosting. J. Computer and System Sciences, 1997.
■ J. Gehrke, R. Ramakrishnan, and V. Ganti. Rainforest: A framework for fast decision tree
construction of large datasets. VLDB’98.
■ J. Gehrke, V. Gant, R. Ramakrishnan, and W.-Y. Loh, BOAT -- Optimistic Decision Tree
Construction. SIGMOD'99.
■ T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani, and J. Friedman. The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data
Mining, Inference, and Prediction. Springer-Verlag, 2001.
■ D. Heckerman, D. Geiger, and D. M. Chickering. Learning Bayesian networks: The
combination of knowledge and statistical data. Machine Learning, 1995.
■ W. Li, J. Han, and J. Pei, CMAR: Accurate and Efficient Classification Based on Multiple
Class-Association Rules, ICDM'01.
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 References (3)

■ T.-S. Lim, W.-Y. Loh, and Y.-S. Shih. A comparison of prediction accuracy, complexity,
and training time of thirty-three old and new classification algorithms. Machine
Learning, 2000.
■ J. Magidson. The Chaid approach to segmentation modeling: Chi-squared
automatic interaction detection. In R. P. Bagozzi, editor, Advanced Methods of
Marketing Research, Blackwell Business, 1994.
■ M. Mehta, R. Agrawal, and J. Rissanen. SLIQ : A fast scalable classifier for data
mining. EDBT'96.
■ T. M. Mitchell. Machine Learning. McGraw Hill, 1997.
■ S. K. Murthy, Automatic Construction of Decision Trees from Data: A
Multi-Disciplinary Survey, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 2(4): 345-389, 1998
■ J. R. Quinlan. Induction of decision trees. Machine Learning, 1:81-106, 1986.
■ J. R. Quinlan and R. M. Cameron-Jones. FOIL: A midterm report. ECML’93.
■ J. R. Quinlan. C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993.
■ J. R. Quinlan. Bagging, boosting, and c4.5. AAAI'96.

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 References (4)
■ R. Rastogi and K. Shim. Public: A decision tree classifier that integrates building and
pruning. VLDB’98.
■ J. Shafer, R. Agrawal, and M. Mehta. SPRINT : A scalable parallel classifier for data
mining. VLDB’96.
■ J. W. Shavlik and T. G. Dietterich. Readings in Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann,
1990.
■ P. Tan, M. Steinbach, and V. Kumar. Introduction to Data Mining. Addison Wesley,
2005.
■ S. M. Weiss and C. A. Kulikowski. Computer Systems that Learn: Classification and
Prediction Methods from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert
Systems. Morgan Kaufman, 1991.
■ S. M. Weiss and N. Indurkhya. Predictive Data Mining. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997.
■ I. H. Witten and E. Frank. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and
Techniques, 2ed. Morgan Kaufmann, 2005.
■ X. Yin and J. Han. CPAR: Classification based on predictive association rules. SDM'03
■ H. Yu, J. Yang, and J. Han. Classifying large data sets using SVM with hierarchical
clusters. KDD'03.

39
 CS412 Midterm Exam Statistics
■ Opinion Question Answering:
■ Like the style: 70.83%, dislike: 29.16%

■ Exam is hard: 55.75%, easy: 0.6%, just right: 43.63%

■ Time: plenty:3.03%, enough: 36.96%, not: 60%

■ Score distribution: # of students (Total: 180)

■ >=90: 24 ■ <40: 2
■ 60-69: 37

■ 80-89: 54
■ 50-59: 15

■ 70-79: 46
■ 40-49: 2

■ Final grading are based on overall score accumulation

and relative class distributions

41
 Issues: Evaluating Classification Methods

■ Accuracy
■ classifier accuracy: predicting class label

■ predictor accuracy: guessing value of predicted attributes

■ Speed
■ time to construct the model (training time)

■ time to use the model (classification/prediction time)

■ Robustness: handling noise and missing values

■ Scalability: efficiency in disk-resident databases
■ Interpretability
■ understanding and insight provided by the model

■ Other measures, e.g., goodness of rules, such as decision tree

size or compactness of classification rules

42
 Predictor Error Measures

■ Measure predictor accuracy: measure how far off the predicted value is from
the actual known value
■ Loss function: measures the error betw. yi and the predicted value yi’
■ Absolute error: | yi – yi’|
■ Squared error: (yi – yi’)2
■ Test error (generalization error): the average loss over the test set
■ Mean absolute error: Mean squared error:

■ Relative absolute error: Relative squared error:

The mean squared-error exaggerates the presence of outliers

Popularly use (square) root mean-square error, similarly, root relative
squared error

43
 Scalable Decision Tree Induction Methods

■ SLIQ (EDBT’96 — Mehta et al.)

■ Builds an index for each attribute and only class list and the

current attribute list reside in memory

■ SPRINT (VLDB’96 — J. Shafer et al.)
■ Constructs an attribute list data structure

■ PUBLIC (VLDB’98 — Rastogi & Shim)

■ Integrates tree splitting and tree pruning: stop growing the

tree earlier
■ RainForest (VLDB’98 — Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)
■ Builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)

■ BOAT (PODS’99 — Gehrke, Ganti, Ramakrishnan & Loh)

■ Uses bootstrapping to create several small samples

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 Data Cube-Based Decision-Tree Induction
■ Integration of generalization with decision-tree induction
(Kamber et al.’97)
■ Classification at primitive concept levels
■ E.g., precise temperature, humidity, outlook, etc.
■ Low-level concepts, scattered classes, bushy
classification-trees
■ Semantic interpretation problems
■ Cube-based multi-level classification
■ Relevance analysis at multi-levels
■ Information-gain analysis with dimension + level

45