Data Preprocessing

Data Preprocessing
 Why preprocess the data?
 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
 Why Data
Preprocessing?

 Data in the real world is dirty

 incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain
attributes of interest, or containing only aggregate data
 noisy: containing errors or outliers
 inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or
names
 No quality data, no quality mining results!
 Quality decisions must be based on quality data
 Data warehouse needs consistent integration of quality
data
 Required for both OLAP and Data Mining!
 Why can Data be
Incomplete?
 Attributes of interest are not available (e.g.,
customer information for sales transaction data)
 Data were not considered important at the time
of transactions, so they were not recorded!
 Data not recorder because of misunderstanding
or malfunctions
 Data may have been recorded and later deleted!
 Missing/unknown values for some data
Why can Data be
Noisy/Inconsistent?
 Faulty instruments for data collection
 Human or computer errors
 Errors in data transmission
 Technology limitations (e.g., sensor data come at
a faster rate than they can be processed)
 Inconsistencies in naming conventions or data
codes (e.g., 2/5/2002 could be 2 May 2002 or 5
Feb 2002)
 Duplicate tuples, which were received twice
should also be removed
 Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing

Major steps involved in data preprocessing:

•Data cleaning
•Data integration
•Data reduction and
•Data transformation
Major Tasks in Data
Preprocessing
 Data cleaning outliers=exceptions!
 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 transformation
 Normalization and aggregation
 Data reduction
 Obtains reduced representation in volume but produces the
same or similar analytical results
 Data discretization
 Part of data reduction but with particular importance,
especially for numerical data
Forms of data preprocessing
 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
 Data Cleaning
 Data cleaning tasks
 Filling in missing values
 smoothing noisy data
 Identify/ removing outliers
 Correcting inconsistent data
 How to Handle Missing
Data?
 Ignore the tuple: usually done when class label is missing
(assuming the tasks in classification)—not effective when the
percentage of missing values per attribute varies considerably.
 Fill in the missing value manually: time consuming and may not
be feasible for large datasets with many missing values.
 Use a global constant to fill in the missing value: replace all
missing attribute values by the same constant “unknown”
 Use the attribute mean/median to fill in the missing value: for
symmetric data distribution use mean and for skewed data
distribution use median.
Cntd..
 Use the attribute mean Identify outliers for
all samples belonging to the same class: to
fill in the missing value: mean/median
value
 Use the most probable value to fill in the
missing value: determined with regression,
inference-based such as Bayesian formula
or decision tree
How to Handle Missing
Data?

Age Income Religion Gender

23 24,200 Muslim M
39 ? Christian F
45 45,390 ? F

Fill missing values using aggregate functions (e.g.,

average) or probabilistic estimates on global value
distribution
E.g., put the average income here, or put the most
probable income based on the fact that the person is 39
years old
E.g., put the most frequent religion here
 Noisy Data
 Noise: random error or variance in a measured
variable
 Incorrect attribute values may exist due to
 faulty data collection instruments
 data entry problems
 data transmission problems
 technology limitation
 inconsistency in naming convention
 Other data problems which requires data cleaning
 duplicate records
 incomplete data
 inconsistent data
 How to Handle Noisy Data?
Smoothing techniques- used for data
discretization
 Binning method:
 sorts data and partition into (equi-depth) bins.
 smooth by bin means: each value in a bin is replaced by the
mean of the bin.
 smooth by bin median: Each bin value then replaced by the
median value.
 smooth by bin boundaries: Each bin value then replaced by
the closest boundary value. The larger the width the greater
the effect of smoothing.
Cntd..
 Regression
 Data smoothing also done using regression, a technique
that confirms data values to a function.
 Linear regression is finding the best to fit two attributes
so that one can be predict the other.
 Multiple Linear Regression:more than 2 attributes are
involved and
 Outlier Analysis
Clustering detect and remove outliers

 Use Concept hierarchies

 use concept hierarchies, e.g., price value ->
“inexpensive”, “Moderately Priced” ,“expensive”
Simple Discretization
Methods: Binning
Example: customer ages number
of values

Equi-width
binning: 0-10 10-20 20-30 30-40 40-50 50-60 60-70 70-80

Equi-width
binning: 0-22 22-31 62-80
38-44 48-55
32-38 44-48 55-62
Smoothing using Binning
Methods
* Sorted data for price (in dollars): 4, 8, 9, 15, 21, 21, 24, 25,
26, 28, 29, 34
* Partition into (equi-depth) bins:
- Bin 1: 4, 8, 9, 15
- Bin 2: 21, 21, 24, 25
- Bin 3: 26, 28, 29, 34
* Smoothing by bin means:
- Bin 1: 9, 9, 9, 9
- Bin 2: 23, 23, 23, 23
- Bin 3: 29, 29, 29, 29
* Smoothing by bin boundaries: [4,15],[21,25],[26,34]
- Bin 1: 4, 4, 4, 15
- Bin 2: 21, 21, 25, 25
- Bin 3: 26, 26, 26, 34
 Cluster
Analysis
salary

cluster

outlier

age
 Regression
y (salary)
Example of linear regression

Y1 y=x+1

X1 x (age)
Data Cleaning as a process
Missing values, noise, and inconsistencies contribute to inaccurate data.
The first step in data cleaning as a process is discrepancy detection.
Discrepancies can be caused by several factors, including poorly designed data
entry forms that have many optional fields, human error in data entry, deliberate
errors (e.g., respondents not wanting to disclose information about themselves),
and data decay (e.g., outdated addresses).
Discrepancies may also arise from inconsistent data representations and
inconsistent use of codes.
Other sources of discrepancies include errors in instrumentation devices that
record data and system errors.
There may also be inconsistencies due to data integration (e.g., where a given
attribute can have different names in different databases).
how can we proceed with discrepancy
detection?

“data about data” is referred to as metadata.

For example,
•what are the data type and domain of each attribute?
•What are the acceptable values for each attribute?
•What is the range of values?
•Do all values fall within the expected range?
 Data Preprocessing
 Why preprocess the data?
 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
 Data
Integration
 Data integration:
 combines data from multiple sources into a coherent store
 Schema integration
 integrate metadata from different sources
 metadata: data about the data (i.e., data descriptors)
 Entity identification problem: identify real world entities
from multiple data sources, e.g., [Link]-id  [Link]-#
 Detecting and resolving data value conflicts
 for the same real world entity, attribute values from
different sources are different (e.g., [Link] and Jonh
Smith may refer to the same person)
 possible reasons: different representations, different
scales, e.g., metric vs. British units (inches vs. cm)
 Redundant Data in
Data Integration
 Redundant data occur often when integration of
multiple databases
 The same attribute may have different names in different
databases
 One attribute may be a “derived” attribute in another
table, e.g., annual revenue
 Redundant data may be able to be detected by
correlation analysis
 Careful integration of the data from multiple
sources may help reduce/avoid redundancies and
inconsistencies and improve mining speed and
quality
 Data
Transformation
 Smoothing: remove noise from data
 Aggregation: summarization, data cube
construction
 Generalization: concept hierarchy climbing
 Normalization: scaled to fall within a small,
specified range
 min-max normalization
 z-score normalization
 normalization by decimal scaling
 Attribute/feature construction
 New attributes constructed from the given ones
Normalization: Why
normalization?
 Speeds-up some learning techniques (ex.
neural networks)
 Helps prevent attributes with large
ranges outweigh ones with small ranges
 Example:
 income has range 3000-200000
 age has range 10-80

 gender has domain M/F

Data Transformation:
Normalization
 min-max normalization
v  minA
v'  (new _ maxA  new _ minA)  new _ minA
maxA  minA
 e.g. convert age=30 to range 0-1, when
min=10,max=80. new_age=(30-10)/(80-10)=2/7
 z-score normalization
v  meanA
v' 
stand_devA
 normalization by decimal scaling
v
v'  j Where j is the smallest integer such that Max(| v ' |)<1
10
 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
 Data Reduction
Strategies
 Warehouse may store terabytes of data: Complex
data analysis/mining may take a very long time to
run on the complete data set
 Data reduction
 Obtains a reduced representation of the data set that is
much smaller in volume but yet produces the same (or
almost the same) analytical results
 Data reduction strategies
 Data cube aggregation
 Dimensionality reduction
 Data compression
 Numerosity reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
 Data Cube Aggregation
 The lowest level of a data cube
 the aggregated data for an individual entity of interest
 e.g., a customer in a phone calling data warehouse.
 Multiple levels of aggregation in data cubes
 Further reduce the size of data to deal with
 Reference appropriate levels
 Use the smallest representation which is enough to solve
the task
 Queries regarding aggregated information should be
answered using data cube, when possible
 Dimensionality
Reduction
 Feature selection (i.e., attribute subset selection):
 Select a minimum set of features such that the probability
distribution of different classes given the values for those
features is as close as possible to the original distribution
given the values of all features
 reduce # of patterns in the patterns, easier to understand
 Heuristic methods (due to exponential # of choices):
 step-wise forward selection
 step-wise backward elimination
 combining forward selection and backward elimination
 decision-tree induction
Heuristic Feature Selection
Methods
 There are 2d possible sub-features of d features
 Several heuristic feature selection methods:
 Best single features under the feature independence
assumption: choose by significance tests.
 Best step-wise feature selection:
 The best single-feature is picked first

 Then next best feature condition to the first, ...

 Step-wise feature elimination:

 Repeatedly eliminate the worst feature

 Best combined feature selection and elimination:

 Optimal branch and bound:
 Use feature elimination and backtracking
Example of Decision Tree Induction

Initial attribute set:

{A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6}
A4 ?

A1? A6?

Class 1 Class 2 Class 1 Class 2

> Reduced attribute set: {A1, A4, A6}

Data
Compression

Original Data Compressed

Data
lossless

os sy
l
Original Data
Approximated
Principal Component Analysis
or Karhuren-Loeve (K-L)
method
 Given N data vectors from k-dimensions, find c
<= k orthogonal vectors that can be best used
to represent data
 The original data set is reduced to one consisting of N
data vectors on c principal components (reduced
dimensions)
 Each data vector is a linear combination of the c
principal component vectors
 Works for numeric data only
 Used when the number of dimensions is large
 Principal Component Analysis

X1, X2: original axes (attributes) X2

Y1,Y2: principal components
Y1
Y2
significant component
(high variance)

X1

Order principal components by significance and eliminate weaker ones

 Reduction:
Reduce the volume
of data
 Parametric methods
 Assume the data fits some model, estimate model
parameters, store only the parameters, and discard the
data (except possible outliers)
 Log-linear models: obtain value at a point in m-D space
as the product on appropriate marginal subspaces
 Non-parametric methods
 Do not assume models
 Major families: histograms, clustering, sampling
 Histograms
 A popular data
reduction technique 40
 Divide data into 35
buckets and store
30
average (or sum) for
each bucket 25
 Can be constructed 20
optimally in one
dimension using 15
dynamic programming10
 Related to
quantization problems. 5
0
10000 30000 50000 70000 90000
Histogram types
 Equal-width histograms:
 It divides the range into N intervals of equal size
 Equal-depth (frequency) partitioning:
 It divides the range into N intervals, each containing
approximately same number of samples
 V-optimal:
 It considers all histogram types for a given number of
buckets and chooses the one with the least variance.
 MaxDiff:
 After sorting the data to be approximated, it defines the
borders of the buckets at points where the adjacent
values have the maximum difference
 Example: split 1,1,4,5,5,7,9,14,16,18,27,30,30,32 to three
buckets MaxDiff 27-18 and 14-9
Histograms
 Clustering
 Partitions data set into clusters, and models it by
one representative from each cluster
 Can be very effective if data is clustered but not
if data is “smeared”
 There are many choices of clustering definitions
and clustering algorithms, further detailed in
Chapter 7
 Cluster
Analysis
the distance between points in the
salary
same cluster should be small
the distance between points in
different clusters should be large
cluster

outlier

age
 Hierarchical Reduction
 Use multi-resolution structure with different
degrees of reduction
 Hierarchical clustering is often performed but tends
to define partitions of data sets rather than
“clusters”
 Parametric methods are usually not amenable to
hierarchical representation
 Hierarchical aggregation
 An index tree hierarchically divides a data set into
partitions by value range of some attributes
 Each partition can be considered as a bucket
 Thus an index tree with aggregates stored at each node is
a hierarchical histogram
 Data Preprocessing

 Why preprocess the data?

 Data cleaning
 Data integration and transformation
 Data reduction
 Discretization and concept hierarchy
generation
 Summary
Discretization
 Three types of attributes:
 Nominal — values from an unordered set
 Ordinal — values from an ordered set
 Continuous — real numbers
 Discretization:
 divide the range of a continuous attribute into
intervals
 why?
 Some classification algorithms only accept
categorical attributes.
 Reduce data size by discretization
 Prepare for further analysis
Discretization and Concept
hierachy
 Discretization
 reduce the number of values for a given continuous
attribute by dividing the range of the attribute into
intervals. Interval labels can then be used to replace
actual data values.
 Concept hierarchies
 reduce the data by collecting and replacing low level
concepts (such as numeric values for the attribute age)
by higher level concepts (such as young, middle-aged,
or senior).
hierarchy generation for
numeric data
 Binning/Smoothing (see sections before)

 Histogram analysis (see sections before)

 Clustering analysis (see sections before)

 Entropy-based discretization

 Segmentation by natural partitioning

 m
Entropy-BasedEntropy: Ent ( S )   p log ( p )
1 i 2 i
i 1
Discretization
 Given a set of samples S, if S is partitioned into two
intervals S1 and S2 using boundary T, the
information gain I(S,T) after partitioning is
| S1 | | S2 |
I (S , T )  Ent ( S 1)  Ent ( S 2)
|S| |S|
 The boundary that maximizes the information gain
over all possible boundaries is selected as a binary
discretization.
 The process is recursively applied to partitions
obtained until some stopping criterion is met, e.g.,
Ent ( S )  I (T , S )  
 Experiments show that it may reduce data size and
improve classification accuracy
Segmentation by natural
partitioning
 Users often like to see numerical ranges partitioned into
relatively uniform, easy-to-read intervals that appear intuitive
or “natural”. E.g., [50-60] better than [51.223-60.812]
The 3-4-5 rule can be used to segment numerical data into
relatively uniform, “natural” intervals.
* If an interval covers 3, 6, 7 or 9 distinct values at the most
significant digit, partition the range into 3 equiwidth intervals
for 3,6,9 or 2-3-2 for 7
* If it covers 2, 4, or 8 distinct values at the most significant
digit, partition the range into 4 equiwidth intervals
* If it covers 1, 5, or 10 distinct values at the most significant
digit, partition the range into 5 equiwidth intervals
The rule can be recursively applied for the resulting intervals
generation for categorical
data
 Categorical attributes: finite, possibly large domain, with no
ordering among the values
 Example: item type
 Specification of a partial ordering of attributes explicitly at
the schema level by users or experts
 Example: location is split by domain experts to
street<city<state<country
 Specification of a portion of a hierarchy by explicit data
grouping
 Specification of a set of attributes, but not of their partial
ordering
 Specification of only a partial set of attributes
Specification of a set of
attributes
Concept hierarchy can be automatically
generated based on the number of distinct
values per attribute in the given attribute set.
The attribute with the most distinct values is
placed at the lowest level of the hierarchy.

country 15 distinct values

province_or_ state 65 distinct

values
city 3567 distinct values

street 674,339 distinct values