Data Mining:

Concepts and Techniques

(3rd ed.)

— Chapter 3 —
Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign &
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber & Pei. All rights reserved.
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 Chapter 3: Data Preprocessing

 Data Preprocessing: An Overview

 Data Quality
 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data Cleaning
 Data Integration
 Data Reduction
 Data Transformation and Data Discretization
 Summary
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 Data Quality: Why Preprocess the Data?

 Measures for data quality: A multidimensional view

 Accuracy: correct or wrong, accurate or not
 Completeness: not recorded, unavailable, …
 Consistency: some modified but some not, dangling, …
 Timeliness: timely update?
 Believability: how trustable the data are correct?
 Interpretability: how easily the data can be
understood?

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 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 reduction
 Dimensionality reduction
 Numerosity reduction
 Data compression
 Data transformation and data discretization
 Normalization
 Concept hierarchy generation
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 Chapter 3: Data Preprocessing

 Data Preprocessing: An Overview

 Data Quality
 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data Cleaning
 Data Integration
 Data Reduction
 Data Transformation and Data Discretization
 Summary
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 Data Cleaning
 Data in the Real World Is Dirty: Lots of potentially incorrect data,
e.g., instrument faulty, human or computer error, transmission error
 incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain attributes of
interest, or containing only aggregate data
 e.g., Occupation=“ ” (missing data)
 noisy: containing noise, errors, or outliers
 e.g., Salary=“−10” (an error)
 inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or names, e.g.,
 Age=“42”, Birthday=“03/07/2010”
 Was rating “1, 2, 3”, now rating “A, B, C”
 discrepancy between duplicate records
 Intentional (e.g., disguised missing data)
 Jan. 1 as everyone’s birthday?
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 Incomplete (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
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 How to Handle Missing Data?
 Ignore the tuple: usually done when class label is missing
(when doing classification)—not effective when the % 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
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 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 require data cleaning

 duplicate records

 incomplete data

 inconsistent data

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 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)

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 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

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 Data Preprocessing

 Data Preprocessing: An Overview

 Data Quality
 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data Cleaning
 Data Integration
 Data Reduction
 Data Transformation and Data Discretization
 Summary
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 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
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 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 and covariance analysis
 Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may
help reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and
improve mining speed and quality
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 Chapter 3: Data Preprocessing

 Data Preprocessing: An Overview

 Data Quality
 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
 Data Cleaning
 Data Integration
 Data Reduction
 Data Transformation and Data Discretization
 Summary
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 Data Reduction Strategies
 Data reduction: Obtain a reduced representation of the data set that
is much smaller in volume but yet produces the same (or almost the
same) analytical results
 Why data reduction? — A database/data warehouse may store
terabytes of data. Complex data analysis may take a very long time to
run on the complete data set.
 Data reduction strategies
 Dimensionality reduction, e.g., remove unimportant attributes

 Wavelet transforms

 Principal Components Analysis (PCA)

 Feature subset selection, feature creation

 Numerosity reduction (some simply call it: Data Reduction)

 Regression and Log-Linear Models

 Histograms, clustering, sampling

 Data cube aggregation

 Data compression

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Data Reduction 1: Dimensionality Reduction
 Curse of dimensionality
 When dimensionality increases, data becomes increasingly sparse
 Density and distance between points, which is critical to clustering, outlier
analysis, becomes less meaningful
 The possible combinations of subspaces will grow exponentially
 Dimensionality reduction
 Avoid the curse of dimensionality
 Help eliminate irrelevant features and reduce noise
 Reduce time and space required in data mining
 Allow easier visualization
 Dimensionality reduction techniques
 Wavelet transforms
 Principal Component Analysis
 Supervised and nonlinear techniques (e.g., feature selection)

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 Attribute Subset Selection
 Another way to reduce dimensionality of data
 Redundant attributes
 Duplicate much or all of the information contained in
one or more other attributes
 E.g., purchase price of a product and the amount of
sales tax paid
 Irrelevant attributes
 Contain no information that is useful for the data
mining task at hand
 E.g., students' ID is often irrelevant to the task of
predicting students' GPA

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