Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Data Visualization

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

1
 Types of Data Sets
 Record
 Relational records
 Data matrix, e.g., numerical matrix,

timeout

season
coach

game
score
team

ball

lost
pla

wi
crosstabs

n
y
 Document data: text documents: term-
frequency vector
Document 1 3 0 5 0 2 6 0 2 0 2
 Transaction data
 Graph and network Document 2 0 7 0 2 1 0 0 3 0 0

 World Wide Web Document 3 0 1 0 0 1 2 2 0 3 0

 Social or information networks
 Molecular Structures
 Ordered TID Items
 Video data: sequence of images 1 Bread, Coke, Milk
 Temporal data: time-series 2 Beer, Bread
 Sequential Data: transaction sequences
3 Beer, Coke, Diaper, Milk
 Genetic sequence data
4 Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk
 Spatial, image and multimedia:
 Spatial data: maps
5 Coke, Diaper, Milk
 Image data:
 Video data:
2
Important Characteristics of Structured Data

 Dimensionality
 Curse of dimensionality
 Sparsity
 Only presence counts
 Resolution
 Patterns depend on the scale
 Distribution
 Centrality and dispersion

3
 Data Objects

 Data sets are made up of data objects

 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
4
 Attributes
 Attribute (or dimensions, features, variables):
a data field, representing a characteristic or feature
of a data object
 E.g., customer_ID, name, address
 Types:
 Nominal

 Binary

 Numeric: quantitative

 Interval-scaled

 Ratio-scaled

5
 Attribute Types
 Nominal: categories, states, or names
 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

6
 Numeric 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 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
7
 Discrete vs. Continuous Attributes
 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
8
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Data Visualization

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

9
 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
 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
10
 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Mean (algebraic measure) (sample vs. population): 1 n
x   xi   x
Note: n is sample size and N is population size n i 1 N
n
Weighted arithmetic mean:
w x

i i
 Trimmed mean: chopping extreme values x i 1
n
 Median: w i 1
i
 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of the
middle two values otherwise
 Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data):
n / 2  ( freq )l
median  L1  ( ) width
 Mode freq median
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 Empirical formula:
mean  mode  3  (mean  median)
11
Symmetric vs. Skewed Data
 Median, mean and mode of symmetric, symmetric
positively and negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

12
 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, 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
 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)

13
 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

14
Graphic Displays of Basic Statistical Descriptions

 Boxplot: graphic display of five-number summary

 Histogram: x-axis are values, y-axis repres. frequencies
 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
15
 Histogram Analysis
 Histogram: Graph display of
tabulated frequencies, shown as 40
bars 35
 It shows what proportion of cases 30
fall into each of several categories
25
 Differs from a bar chart in that it is
20
the area of the bar that denotes the
value, not the height as in bar 15
charts, a crucial distinction when the 10
categories are not of uniform width
5
 The categories are usually specified
0
as non-overlapping intervals of 10000 30000 50000 70000 90000
some variable. The categories (bars)
must be adjacent

16
Histograms Often Tell More than Boxplots

 The two histograms

shown in the left may
have the same boxplot
representation
 The same values
for: min, Q1,
median, Q3, max
 But they have rather
different data
distributions

17
 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

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 18

 Quantile-Quantile (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

19
 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

20
Positively and Negatively Correlated Data

 The left half fragment is positively

correlated
 The right half is negative correlated

21
Uncorrelated Data

22
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Data Visualization

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

23
 Data Visualization
 Why data visualization?
 Gain insight into an information space by
mapping data onto graphical primitives
 Provide qualitative overview of large data sets
 Search for patterns, trends, structure,
irregularities, relationships among data
 Help find interesting regions and suitable
parameters for further quantitative analysis
 Provide a visual proof of computer
representations derived
24
 Visualization Methods
 Categorization of visualization methods:
 Pixel-oriented techniques

 Geometric projection techniques

 Icon-based techniques

 Hierarchical techniques

 Visualizing complex data and relations

25
 Pixel-Oriented Visualization Techniques
 For a data set of m dimensions, create m windows on the screen, one
for each dimension
 The m dimension values of a record are mapped to m pixels at the
corresponding positions in the windows
 The colors of the pixels reflect the corresponding values

(a) Income (b) Credit Limit (c) transaction volume (d) age
26
 Laying Out Pixels in Circle Segments
 To save space and show the connections among multiple dimensions,
space filling is often done in a circle segment

(a) Representing a data record

(b) Laying out pixels in circle segment
in circle segment
27
Geometric Projection Visualization Techniques

 Visualization of geometric transformations and projections

of the data
 Methods
 Direct visualization
 Scatterplot and scatterplot matrices
 Landscapes
 Projection pursuit technique: Help users find meaningful
projections of multidimensional data
 Prosection views
 Hyperslice
 Parallel coordinates
28
Ribbons with Twists Based on Vorticity
Direct Data Visualization

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 29

 Scatterplot Matrices

Used by ermission of M. Ward, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Matrix of scatterplots (x-y-diagrams) of the k-dim. data [total of (k2/2-k) scatterplots]

30
 Landscapes
Used by permission of B. Wright, Visible Decisions Inc.

news articles
visualized as
a landscape

 Visualization of the data as perspective landscape

 The data needs to be transformed into a (possibly artificial) 2D
spatial representation which preserves the characteristics of the data
31
 Parallel Coordinates
 n equidistant axes which are parallel to one of the screen axes and
correspond to the attributes
 The axes are scaled to the [minimum, maximum]: range of the
corresponding attribute
 Every data item corresponds to a polygonal line which intersects each
of the axes at the point which corresponds to the value for the
attribute

• • •

Attr. 1 Attr. 2 Attr. 3 Attr. k

32
Parallel Coordinates of a Data Set

33
 Visualizing Complex Data and Relations
 Visualizing non-numerical data: text and social networks
 Tag cloud: visualizing user-generated tags
 The importance of
tag is represented
by font size/color
 Besides text data,
there are also
methods to visualize
relationships, such as
visualizing social
networks

Newsmap: Google News Stories in 2005

Visualizing Complex Data and Relations

35
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Data Visualization

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

36
 Similarity and Dissimilarity
 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

37
 Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
 Data matrix
 n data points with p  x11 ... x1f ... x1p 
 
dimensions  ... ... ... ... ... 
 Two modes x ... xif ... xip 
 i1 
 ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xnf ... xnp 
 n1 
 Dissimilarity matrix
 n data points, but
 0 
 d(2,1) 0 
registers only the  
 d(3,1) d ( 3,2) 0 
distance  
 A triangular matrix  : : : 
d ( n,1) d ( n,2) ... ... 0
 Single mode

38
 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
d (i, j)  p 
p
m

 Method 2: Use a large number of binary attributes

 creating a new binary attribute for each of the
M nominal states

39
 Proximity Measure for Binary Attributes
Object j
 A contingency table for binary data
Object i

 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”:

40
 Dissimilarity between Binary Variables
 Example
Name Gender Fever Cough Test-1 Test-2 Test-3 Test-4
Jack M Y N P N N N
Mary F Y N P N P N
Jim M Y P N N N N

 Gender is a symmetric attribute

 The remaining attributes are asymmetric binary
 Let the values Y and P be 1, and the value N 0
01
d ( jack , mary )   0.33
2 01
11
d ( jack , jim )   0.67
111
1 2
d ( jim , mary )   0.75
11 2
41
 Standardizing Numeric Data
x
z   
 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
s f  1n (| x1 f  m f |  | x2 f  m f | ... | xnf  m f |)
where m  1 (x  x  ...  x )
n 1f 2 f xif  m f
.
f nf

zif  sf
 standardized measure (z-score):
 Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using standard
deviation

42
 Example:
Data Matrix and Dissimilarity Matrix
Data Matrix
x2 x4
point attribute1 attribute2
4 x1 1 2
x2 3 5
x3 2 0
x4 4 5
2 x1
Dissimilarity Matrix
(with Euclidean Distance)
x3
0 4 x1 x2 x3 x4
2
x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 5.1 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0

43
Distance on Numeric Data: Minkowski Distance
 Minkowski distance: A popular distance measure

where i = (xi1, xi2, …, xip) and j = (xj1, xj2, …, xjp) are two p-
dimensional data objects, and h is the order (the
distance so defined is also called L- h norm)
 Properties
 d(i, j) > 0 if i ≠ j, and d(i, i) = 0 (Positive definiteness)
 d(i, j) = d(j, i) (Symmetry)
 d(i, j)  d(i, k) + d(k, j) (Triangle Inequality)
 A distance that satisfies these properties is a metric
44
 Special Cases of Minkowski Distance
 h = 1: Manhattan (city block, L1 norm) distance
 E.g., the Hamming distance: the number of bits that are
different between two binary vectors
d (i, j) | x  x |  | x  x | ... | x  x |
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h = 2: (L2 norm) Euclidean distance

d (i, j)  (| x  x |2  | x  x |2 ... | x  x |2 )
i1 j1 i2 j 2 ip jp

 h  . “supremum” (Lmax norm, L norm) distance.

 This is the maximum difference between any component
(attribute) of the vectors

45
 Example: Minkowski Distance
Dissimilarity Matrices
point attribute 1 attribute 2 Manhattan (L1)
x1 1 2
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x2 3 5 x1 0
x3 2 0 x2 5 0
x4 4 5 x3 3 6 0
x4 6 1 7 0
Euclidean (L2)
x2 x4
L2 x1 x2 x3 x4
4 x1 0
x2 3.61 0
x3 2.24 5.1 0
x4 4.24 1 5.39 0

2 x1
Supremum
L x1 x2 x3 x4
x1 0
x2 3 0
x3 x3 2 5 0
0 2 4 x4 3 1 5 0
46
 Ordinal Variables

 An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous

 Order is important, e.g., rank
 Can be treated like interval-scaled
 replace x by their rank rif {1,..., M f }
if

 map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing

i-th object in the f-th variable by
rif 1
zif 
M f 1

 compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval-

scaled variables

47
 Attributes of Mixed Type
 A database may contain all attribute types
 Nominal, symmetric binary, asymmetric binary,

numeric, ordinal
 One may use a weighted formula to combine their effects
 pf  1 ij( f ) dij( f )
d (i, j) 
 pf  1 ij( f )
 f is binary or nominal:
dij(f) = 0 if xif = xjf , or dij(f) = 1 otherwise
 f is numeric: use the normalized distance
 f is ordinal

Compute ranks rif and zif  r 1
if


Treat zif as interval-scaled
M 1 f

48
 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
49
 Example: Cosine Similarity
 cos(d1, d2) = (d1  d2) /||d1|| ||d2||
where  indicates vector dot product, ||d|: the length of vector d

 Ex: Find the similarity between documents 1 and 2

d1 = (5, 0, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0)
d2 = (3, 0, 2, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1)

d1d2 = 5*3+0*0+3*2+0*0+2*1+0*1+0*1+2*1+0*0+0*1 = 25
||d1||= (5*5+0*0+3*3+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0)0.5=(42)0.5
= 6.481
||d2||= (3*3+0*0+2*2+0*0+1*1+1*1+0*0+1*1+0*0+1*1)0.5=(17)0.5
= 4.12
cos(d1, d2 ) = 0.94
50
 Chapter 2: Getting to Know Your Data

 Data Objects and Attribute Types

 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data

 Data Visualization

 Measuring Data Similarity and Dissimilarity

 Summary

51
 Summary
 Data attribute types: nominal, binary, ordinal, interval-scaled, ratio-
scaled
 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

52
 References
 W. Cleveland, Visualizing Data, Hobart Press, 1993
 T. Dasu and T. Johnson. Exploratory Data Mining and Data Cleaning. John Wiley, 2003
 U. Fayyad, G. Grinstein, and A. Wierse. Information Visualization in Data Mining and
Knowledge Discovery, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001
 L. Kaufman and P. J. Rousseeuw. Finding Groups in Data: an Introduction to Cluster
Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, 1990.
 H. V. Jagadish, et al., Special Issue on Data Reduction Techniques. Bulletin of the Tech.
Committee on Data Eng., 20(4), Dec. 1997
 D. A. Keim. Information visualization and visual data mining, IEEE trans. on Visualization
and Computer Graphics, 8(1), 2002
 D. Pyle. Data Preparation for Data Mining. Morgan Kaufmann, 1999
 S. Santini and R. Jain,” Similarity measures”, IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence, 21(9), 1999
 E. R. Tufte. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd ed., Graphics Press,
2001
 C. Yu , et al., Visual data mining of multimedia data for social and behavioral studies,
Information Visualization, 8(1), 2009
53