Concepts and

Techniques

— Chapter 2 —

Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, and Jian Pei

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Simon Fraser University
©2011 Han, Kamber, and Pei. All rights
reserved.
1
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

2
 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

Sequential Data: transaction 2 Beer, Bread
sequences 3 Beer, Coke, Diaper, Milk

Genetic sequence data 4 Beer, Bread, Diaper, Milk
 Spatial, image and multimedia:
5 Coke, Diaper, Milk

Spatial data: maps

Image data:

Video data:
3
 Important Characteristics of
Structured Data

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

4
 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.
5
 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
6
 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., Covid positive)
 Ordinal
 Values have a meaningful order (ranking) but the
magnitude between successive values is not known.
 Size = {small, medium, large}, grades, army rankings
7
 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

8
 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
9
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

10
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
11
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)
12
 Symmetric vs. Skewed
Data

 Median, mean and mode of symmetric

symmetric, positively and
negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

April 9, 2025 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, 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
2
s  
n  1 i 1
2

( xi  x )   2
[ xi  ( xi ) ]
n  1 i 1 n i 1
   ( xi   ) 2 
2

N i 1 N
 xi   2
i 1
2

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

14
 Boxplot Analysis
 Five-number summary of a distribution
 Minimum, Q1, Median, 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 IQR
 The median is marked by a line within
the box
 Whiskers: two lines outside the box
extended to Minimum and Maximum
 Outliers: points beyond a specified
outlier threshold, plotted individually
15
 Visualization of Data Dispersion: 3-D
Boxplots

April 9, 2025 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 16

 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

17
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
18
 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 the area of the bar that denotes 20
the value, not the height as in bar 15
charts, a crucial distinction when
the categories are not of uniform 10
width 5
 The categories are usually 0
specified as non-overlapping 10000 30000 50000 70000 90000

intervals of some variable. The

categories (bars) must be
adjacent
19
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

20
 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

Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 21

 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.

22
 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

23
Positively and Negatively Correlated
Data

 The left half fragment is positively

correlated
 The right half is negative correlated

24
Uncorrelated Data

25
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

26
 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
 Categorization of visualization methods:
 Pixel-oriented visualization techniques
 Geometric projection visualization techniques
 Icon-based visualization techniques
 Hierarchical visualization techniques
 Visualizing complex data and relations
27
 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 (c) transaction (d) age

Limit volume 28
 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
29
Geometric Projection Visualization
Techniques

30
 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]

31
 Icon-Based Visualization
Techniques

 Visualization of the data values as features of icons

 Typical visualization methods
 Chernoff Faces
 Stick Figures
 General techniques
 Shape coding: Use shape to represent certain
information encoding
 Color icons: Use color icons to encode more
information
 Tile bars: Use small icons to represent the
relevant feature vectors in document retrieval
32
 Chernoff Faces
 A way to display variables on a two-dimensional surface, e.g.,
let x be eyebrow slant, y be eye size, z be nose length, etc.
 The figure shows faces produced using 10 characteristics--
head eccentricity, eye size, eye spacing, eye eccentricity,
pupil size, eyebrow slant, nose size, mouth shape, mouth
size, and mouth opening): Each assigned one of 10 possible
values, generated using Mathematica (S. Dickson)
 REFERENCE: Gonick, L. and Smith, W.
The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. New York:
Harper Perennial, p. 212, 1993
 Weisstein, Eric W. "Chernoff Face." From
MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.
mathworld.wolfram.com/ChernoffFace.htm
l
33
 Stick Figure
A census data
figure showing
age, income,
used by permission of G. Grinstein, University of Massachusettes at Lowell

gender,
education, etc.

A 5-piece
stick figure (1
body and 4
limbs w.
different
Two attributes mapped to axes, remaining attributes mapped to angle or length of limbs”. Look at texture pattern
angle/length)
34
 Hierarchical Visualization
Techniques

 Visualization of the data using a

hierarchical partitioning into subspaces
 Methods
 Dimensional Stacking
 Worlds-within-Worlds
 Tree-Map
 Cone Trees
 InfoCube

35
Cluster Dendrogram

36
 Worlds-within-Worlds
 Assign the function and two most important parameters to
innermost world
 Fix all other parameters at constant values - draw other (1 or 2
or 3 dimensional worlds choosing these as the axes)
 Software that uses this paradigm
 N–vision: Dynamic
interaction through
data glove and stereo
displays, including
rotation, scaling
(inner) and translation
(inner/outer)
 Auto Visual: Static
interaction by means
of queries
37
 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

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

39
 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

Sim( i , j ) = 1 - d ( i , j )
40
 Data Matrix and Dissimilarity
Matrix
 Data matrix
 n data points with  x11 ... x1f ... x1p 
 
p 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

41
 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

42
 Example
Object Test-1 Test-2 Test-3
(Identifier) (Nominal) (ordinal) (Numeric)
1 A Excellent 45
2 B Fair 22
3 C Good 64
4 A Excellent 28

Name Colour1 and Colour2

Jim Red, Green
Jack Red, Yellow
mary Blue, Blue

43
 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”:

44
 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
45
 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

46
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

47
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

48
 Example: Minkowski Distance
Dissimilarity Matrices
point attribute 1 attribute 2 Manhattan
x1 1 2 (L1)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
 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 
Mf 1

 compute the dissimilarity using methods for

interval-scaled variables

50
 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)  p
 f 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  rif  1


Treat zif as interval-scaled Mf 1
51
 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
52
 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

53
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

54
 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.

55
 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
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