Data Warehousing and Data Mining Assignment 3
Name: Tanya Maheshwari
Enrollment No. 02613702022
Submitted to: Ms. Ruchika
1. Explain the steps involved in data pre-processing, including data cleaning, integration,
reduction, transformation, and discretization.
Answer:
Data pre-processing is essential for preparing raw data into a usable format for analysis or machine
learning. It involves several key steps:
Data Cleaning: Removes noise, corrects inconsistencies, and handles missing values.
Common methods include deleting or imputing missing data and resolving duplicate or
inconsistent entries.
Data Integration: Combines data from multiple sources into a coherent dataset. This may
involve schema matching, resolving data conflicts, and entity identification.
Data Reduction: Reduces the volume while maintaining data integrity. Techniques include
dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA), numerosity reduction, and data compression to enhance
performance.
Data Transformation: Converts data into suitable formats or scales. This includes
normalization (e.g., min-max scaling), aggregation, and encoding categorical variables.
Data Discretization: Converts continuous data into discrete bins or categories. Techniques
include binning, histogram analysis, and clustering-based methods.
These steps improve data quality, eliminate bias or redundancy, and ensure better model performance.
2. Introduce the IRIS dataset and its significance in data analysis and machine learning.
Answer:
The IRIS dataset is one of the most well-known and widely used datasets in data science and
machine learning. It was introduced by the British biologist Ronald A. Fisher in 1936.
The dataset contains 150 samples of iris flowers from three species: Iris Setosa, Iris Versicolor, and
Iris Virginica. Each sample includes four numerical features: sepal length, sepal width, petal length,
and petal width (in cm).
This dataset is significant because:
It is small, clean, and well-structured, making it ideal for learning and testing classification
algorithms.
It allows easy visualization and exploratory data analysis (EDA).
It is commonly used to demonstrate supervised learning, especially multiclass
classification, using algorithms like KNN, SVM, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression.
Its simplicity and effectiveness in demonstrating key machine learning concepts make it a standard
beginner's dataset in the field.
3. Describe the Apriori algorithm and how it works to discover frequent item sets and
association rules.
Answer:
The Apriori algorithm is a popular method used in association rule mining to discover frequent
itemsets and generate association rules in large transactional datasets.
It works as follows:
1. Generate frequent itemsets: It starts by identifying individual items (1-itemsets) that meet a
minimum support threshold. Then, it iteratively generates larger itemsets (2-itemsets, 3-
itemsets, etc.) using the Apriori property, which states that all subsets of a frequent itemset
must also be frequent.
2. Prune non-frequent sets: Itemsets that do not meet the support threshold are removed,
reducing the search space.
3. Generate association rules: From the frequent itemsets, rules of the form A → B are
generated, where A and B are itemsets. These rules must meet confidence and lift thresholds.
Apriori is widely used in market basket analysis, helping retailers find product associations (e.g.,
"Customers who bought bread also bought butter").
4. Explain the concept of data mining and its significance in various fields.
Answer:
Data mining is the process of discovering patterns, relationships, trends, or useful information
from large volumes of data using statistical, machine learning, and database techniques.
It involves several steps including data selection, preprocessing, mining (pattern discovery), and
interpretation.
Significance across fields:
Business: Identifies customer behavior, improves marketing strategies, and detects fraud.
Healthcare: Predicts disease outbreaks, personalizes treatments, and analyzes medical
records.
Education: Tracks student performance, optimizes learning strategies, and identifies drop-out
risks.
Finance: Assesses credit risk, detects anomalies in transactions, and aids in investment
decisions.
E-commerce: Recommends products, personalizes content, and improves customer
experience.
Data mining enables data-driven decision making, offering insights that were previously hidden in
large datasets. It is a core component of modern data science and AI applications.
