Data Mining: Data

Lecture Notes for Chapter 2

Introduction to Data Mining

by
Tan, Steinbach, Kumar

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 1

 What is Data?

● Collection of data objects and Attributes

their attributes

● An attribute is a property or
characteristic of an object
– Examples: eye color of a
person, temperature, etc.
– Attribute is also known as
variable, field, characteristic,
or feature Objects
● A collection of attributes
describe an object
– Object is also known as
record, point, case, sample,
entity, or instance

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 2

 Attribute Values

● Attribute values are numbers or symbols

assigned to an attribute

● Distinction between attributes and attribute values

– Same attribute can be mapped to different attribute
values
◆ Example: height can be measured in feet or meters

– Different attributes can be mapped to the same set of

values
◆ Example: Attribute values for ID and age are integers
◆ But properties of attribute values can be different
– ID has no limit but age has a maximum and minimum
value
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 Measurement of Length
● The way you measure an attribute is somewhat may not match
the attributes properties.

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 4

 Types of Attributes

● There are different types of attributes

– Nominal
◆ Examples: ID numbers, eye color, zip codes
– Ordinal
◆ Examples: rankings (e.g., taste of potato chips on a scale
from 1-10), grades, height in {tall, medium, short}
– Interval
◆ Examples: calendar dates, temperatures in Celsius or
Fahrenheit.
– Ratio
◆ Examples: temperature in Kelvin, length, time, counts

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 Properties of Attribute Values

● The type of an attribute depends on which of the

following properties it possesses:
– Distinctness: = ≠
– Order: < >
– Addition: + -
– Multiplication: */

– Nominal attribute: distinctness

– Ordinal attribute: distinctness & order
– Interval attribute: distinctness, order & addition
– Ratio attribute: all 4 properties
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Attribute Description Examples Operations
Type

Nominal The values of a nominal zip codes, mode, entropy,

attribute are just different employee ID contingency
names, i.e., nominal attributes numbers, eye correlation, χ2
provide only enough color, sex: {male, test
information to distinguish female}
one object from another. (=, ≠)
Ordinal The values of an ordinal hardness of median,
attribute provide enough minerals, {good, percentiles,
information to order objects. better, best}, rank correlation,
(<, >) grades, street run tests, sign
numbers tests

Interval For interval attributes, the calendar dates, mean, standard

differences between values temperature in deviation,
are meaningful, i.e., a unit of Celsius or Pearson's
measurement exists. Fahrenheit correlation, t
(+, - ) and F tests

Ratio For ratio variables, both temperature in geometric mean,

differences and ratios are Kelvin, monetary harmonic mean,
meaningful. (*, /) quantities, counts, percent
age, mass, length, variation
electrical current
Attribut Transformation Comments
e Level

Nominal Any permutation of values If all employee ID

numbers were
reassigned, would it
make any difference?
Ordinal An order preserving change An attribute
of values, i.e., encompassing the
new_value = f(old_value) notion of good, better
where f is a monotonic best can be
function. represented equally
well by the values {1,
Interval new_value =a * old_value + b Thus, the
2, 3} or byFahrenheit
{ 0.5, 1, 10}.
where a and b are constants and Celsius
temperature scales
differ in terms of
where their zero value
is and the size of a
Ratio new_value = a * old_value Length can be
unit (degree).
measured in meters or
feet.
 Discrete and Continuous Attributes

● Discrete Attribute
– Has only a finite or countably infinite set of values
– Examples: zip codes, counts, or the set of words in a collection
of documents
– Often represented as integer variables.
– Note: binary attributes are a special case of discrete attributes

● Continuous Attribute
– Has real numbers as attribute values
– Examples: 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.

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 Types of data sets

● Record
– Data Matrix
– Document Data
– Transaction Data

● Graph
– World Wide Web
– Molecular Structures

● Ordered
– Spatial Data
– Temporal Data
– Sequential Data
– Genetic Sequence Data

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Important Characteristics of Structured Data

– Dimensionality
◆ Curse of Dimensionality

– Sparsity
◆ Only presence counts

– Resolution
◆ Patterns depend on the scale

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 Record Data

● Data that consists of a collection of records, each

of which consists of a fixed set of attributes

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 12

 Data Matrix

● If data objects have the same fixed set of numeric

attributes, then the data objects can be thought of as
points in a multi-dimensional space, where each
dimension represents a distinct attribute

● Such data set can be represented by an m by n matrix,

where there are m rows, one for each object, and n
columns, one for each attribute

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 Document Data

● Each document becomes a `term' vector,

– each term is a component (attribute) of the vector,
– the value of each component is the number of times
the corresponding term occurs in the document.

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 Transaction Data

● A special type of record data, where

– each record (transaction) involves a set of items.
– For example, consider a grocery store. The set of
products purchased by a customer during one
shopping trip constitute a transaction, while the
individual products that were purchased are the items.

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 Graph Data

● Examples: Generic graph and HTML Links

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 Chemical Data

● Benzene Molecule: C6H6

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 Ordered Data

● Sequences of transactions
Items/Events

An element of
the sequence
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 Ordered Data

● Genomic sequence data

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 Ordered Data

● Spatio-Temporal Data

Average
Monthly
Temperature of
land and ocean

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 Data Quality

● What kinds of data quality problems?

● How can we detect problems with the data?
● What can we do about these problems?

● Examples of data quality problems:

– Noise and outliers
– missing values
– duplicate data

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 21

 Noise

● Noise refers to modification of original values

– Examples: distortion of a person’s voice when talking
on a poor phone and “snow” on television screen

Two Sine Waves Two Sine Waves + Noise

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 Outliers

● Outliers are data objects with characteristics that

are considerably different than most of the other
data objects in the data set

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 Missing Values

● Reasons for missing values

– Information is not collected
(e.g., people decline to give their age and weight)
– Attributes may not be applicable to all cases
(e.g., annual income is not applicable to children)

● Handling missing values

– Eliminate Data Objects
– Estimate Missing Values
– Ignore the Missing Value During Analysis
– Replace with all possible values (weighted by their
probabilities)

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 Duplicate Data

● Data set may include data objects that are

duplicates, or almost duplicates of one another
– Major issue when merging data from heterogeous
sources

● Examples:
– Same person with multiple email addresses

● Data cleaning
– Process of dealing with duplicate data issues

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 Data Preprocessing

● Aggregation
● Sampling
● Dimensionality Reduction
● Feature subset selection
● Feature creation
● Discretization and Binarization
● Attribute Transformation

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 Aggregation

● Combining two or more attributes (or objects)

into a single attribute (or object)

● Purpose
– Data reduction
◆ Reduce the number of attributes or objects
– Change of scale
◆ Cities aggregated into regions, states, countries, etc
– More “stable” data
◆ Aggregated data tends to have less variability

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 Aggregation

Variation of Precipitation in Australia

Standard Deviation of Average Standard Deviation of Average

Monthly Precipitation Yearly Precipitation

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 Sampling

● Sampling is the main technique employed for data

selection.
– It is often used for both the preliminary investigation of
the data and the final data analysis.

● Statisticians sample because obtaining the entire

set of data of interest is too expensive or time
consuming.

● Sampling is used in data mining because

processing the entire set of data of interest is too
expensive or time consuming.

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 29

 Sampling …

● The key principle for effective sampling is the

following:
– using a sample will work almost as well as using the
entire data sets, if the sample is representative

– A sample is representative if it has approximately the

same property (of interest) as the original set of data

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 30

 Types of Sampling

● Simple Random Sampling

– There is an equal probability of selecting any particular item

● Sampling without replacement

– As each item is selected, it is removed from the population

● Sampling with replacement

– Objects are not removed from the population as they are
selected for the sample.
◆ In sampling with replacement, the same object can be picked up
more than once

● Stratified sampling
– Split the data into several partitions; then draw random samples
from each partition
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Sample Size

8000 points 2000 Points 500 Points

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 Sample Size

● What sample size is necessary to get at

least one object from each of 10 groups.

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 Curse of Dimensionality

● When dimensionality
increases, data becomes
increasingly sparse in the
space that it occupies

● Definitions of density and

distance between points,
which is critical for
clustering and outlier
detection, become less
meaningful • Randomly generate 500 points
• Compute difference between max and min
distance between any pair of points

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 34

 Dimensionality Reduction

● Purpose:
– Avoid curse of dimensionality
– Reduce amount of time and memory required by data
mining algorithms
– Allow data to be more easily visualized
– May help to eliminate irrelevant features or reduce
noise

● Techniques
– Principle Component Analysis
– Singular Value Decomposition
– Others: supervised and non-linear techniques

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 Dimensionality Reduction: PCA

● Goal is to find a projection that captures the

largest amount of variation in data

x
2

x
1

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 Dimensionality Reduction: PCA

● Find the eigenvectors of the covariance matrix

● The eigenvectors define the new space

x
2

x
1
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 Dimensionality Reduction: ISOMAP

By: Tenenbaum, de
Silva, Langford
(2000)

● Construct a neighbourhood graph

● For each pair of points in the graph, compute the shortest
path distances – geodesic distances

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 38

 Dimensionality Reduction: PCA

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 Feature Subset Selection

● Another way to reduce dimensionality of data

● Redundant features
– duplicate much or all of the information contained in
one or more other attributes
– Example: purchase price of a product and the
amount of sales tax paid

● Irrelevant features
– contain no information that is useful for the data
mining task at hand
– Example: students' ID is often irrelevant to the task of
predicting students' GPA
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 Feature Subset Selection

● Techniques:
– Brute-force approch:
◆ Try all possible feature subsets as input to data mining algorithm
– Embedded approaches:
◆ Feature selection occurs naturally as part of the data mining
algorithm
– Filter approaches:
◆ Features are selected before data mining algorithm is run
– Wrapper approaches:
◆ Use the data mining algorithm as a black box to find best subset
of attributes

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 41

 Feature Creation

● Create new attributes that can capture the

important information in a data set much more
efficiently than the original attributes

● Three general methodologies:

– Feature Extraction
◆ domain-specific
– Mapping Data to New Space
– Feature Construction
◆ combining features

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 Discretization Using Class Labels

● Entropy based approach

3 categories for both x and y 5 categories for both x and y

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 Binarization

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Discretization Without Using Class Labels

Data Equal interval width

Equal frequency K-means

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 Attribute Transformation

● A function that maps the entire set of values of a

given attribute to a new set of replacement
values such that each old value can be identified
with one of the new values
– Simple functions: xk, log(x), ex, |x|
– Standardization and Normalization

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 Similarity and Dissimilarity

● Similarity
– Numerical measure of how alike two data objects are.
– Is higher when objects are more alike.
– Often falls in the range [0,1]
● Dissimilarity
– Numerical measure of how different are two data
objects
– Lower when objects are more alike
– Minimum dissimilarity is often 0
– Upper limit varies
● Proximity refers to a similarity or dissimilarity
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 Similarity/Dissimilarity for Simple Attributes

p and q are the attribute values for two data objects.

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 Euclidean Distance

● Euclidean Distance

Where n is the number of dimensions (attributes) and p k and q k

are, respectively, the k th attributes (components) or data
objects p and q.

● Standardization is necessary, if scales differ.

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 Euclidean Distance

Distance Matrix

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 Minkowski Distance

● Minkowski Distance is a generalization of Euclidean

Distance

Where r is a parameter, n is the number of dimensions

(attributes) and p k and q k are, respectively, the kth attributes
(components) or data objects p and q.

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 Minkowski Distance: Examples

● r = 1. City block (Manhattan, taxicab, L1 norm) distance.

– A common example of this is the Hamming distance, which is just the
number of bits that are different between two binary vectors

● r = 2. Euclidean distance

● Do not confuse r with n, i.e., all these distances are

defined for all numbers of dimensions.

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 52

 Minkowski Distance

Distance Matrix
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 Mahalanobis Distance

Σ is the covariance matrix of

the input data X

For red points, the Euclidean distance is 14.7, Mahalanobis distance is 6.

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 Mahalanobis Distance

Covariance Matrix:

B A: (0.5, 0.5)
B: (0, 1)
A C: (1.5, 1.5)

Mahal(A,B) = 5
Mahal(A,C) = 4

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 55

 Common Properties of a Distance

● Distances, such as the Euclidean distance,

have some well known properties.
1. d(p, q) ≥ 0 for all p and q and d(p, q) = 0 only if
p = q. (Positive definiteness)
2. d(p, q) = d(q, p) for all p and q. (Symmetry)
3. d(p, r) ≤ d(p, q) + d(q, r) for all points p, q, and r.
(Triangle Inequality)
where d(p, q) is the distance (dissimilarity) between
points (data objects), p and q.

● A distance that satisfies these properties is a

metric
© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 56
 Common Properties of a Similarity

● Similarities, also have some well known

properties.
1. s(p, q) = 1 (or maximum similarity) only if p = q.

2. s(p, q) = s(q, p) for all p and q. (Symmetry)

where s(p, q) is the similarity between points (data

objects), p and q.

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 Similarity Between Binary Vectors

● Common situation is that objects, p and q, have only

binary attributes
● Compute similarities using the following quantities
M 01 = the number of attributes where p was 0 and q was 1
M 10 = the number of attributes where p was 1 and q was 0
M 00 = the number of attributes where p was 0 and q was 0
M 11 = the number of attributes where p was 1 and q was 1

● Simple Matching and Jaccard Coefficients

SMC = number of matches / number of attributes
= (M 11 + M00 ) / (M 01 + M10 + M11 + M00 )

J = number of 11 matches / number of not-both-zero attributes values

= (M11) / (M 01 + M10 + M11)

© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining 4/18/2004 58

 SMC versus Jaccard: Example

p= 1000000000
q= 0000001001

M 01 = 2 (the number of attributes where p was 0 and q was 1)

M 10 = 1 (the number of attributes where p was 1 and q was 0)
M 00 = 7 (the number of attributes where p was 0 and q was 0)
M 11 = 0 (the number of attributes where p was 1 and q was 1)

SMC = (M11 + M00)/(M01 + M10 + M11 + M00) = (0+7) / (2+1+0+7) = 0.7

J = (M11) / (M01 + M10 + M11) = 0 / (2 + 1 + 0) = 0

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 Cosine Similarity

● If d 1 and d 2 are two document vectors, then

cos( d 1, d 2 ) = (d 1 ∙ d 2) / ||d 1|| ||d 2|| ,
where ∙ indicates vector dot product and || d || is the length of vector d.

● Example:

d1 = 3 2 0 5 0 0 0 2 0 0
d2 = 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 2

d1 ∙ d 2 = 3*1 + 2*0 + 0*0 + 5*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 0*0 + 2*1 + 0*0 + 0*2 = 5
||d 1 || = (3*3+2*2+0*0+5*5+0*0+0*0+0*0+2*2+0*0+0*0) 0.5 = (42) 0.5
= 6.481
||d 2 || = (1*1+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+0*0+1*1+0*0+2*2) 0.5 = (6) 0.5 = 2.245

cos( d1, d2 ) = .3150

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 Extended Jaccard Coefficient (Tanimoto)

● Variation of Jaccard for continuous or count

attributes
– Reduces to Jaccard for binary attributes

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 Correlation

● Correlation measures the linear relationship

between objects
● To compute correlation, we standardize data
objects, p and q, and then take their dot product

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 Visually Evaluating Correlation

Scatter plots
showing the
similarity
from –1 to 1.

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 General Approach for Combining Similarities

● Sometimes attributes are of many different

types, but an overall similarity is needed.

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 Using Weights to Combine Similarities

● May not want to treat all attributes the same.

– Use weights wk which are between 0 and 1 and sum
to 1.

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 WEKA Filters

● 1- ReplaceMissingValues.
● AddExpression
● Resample
● NominalToBinary
● Discritize (Equal width)
● PKIDiscritize (Equal Frequency)
● Standardize or Center → Mean=0, Std=1
● Normalize → [0,1]

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