Data Mining:
Concepts and Techniques
1
Data Quality: Why Preprocess the Data?
Measures for data quality: A multidimensional view
Accuracy: correct or wrong, accurate or not
Completeness: not recorded, unavailable, …
Consistency: some modified but some not
Timeliness: timely update?
Believability: how trustable the data are correct?
Interpretability: how easily the data can be
understood?
2
Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
Data cleaning
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 reduction
Dimensionality reduction
Numerosity reduction
Data compression
Data transformation and data discretization
Normalization
Concept hierarchy generation
3
Data Cleaning
Data in the Real World Is Dirty: Lots of potentially incorrect data,
e.g., instrument faulty, human or computer error, transmission error
incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain attributes of
interest, or containing only aggregate data
e.g., Occupation=“ ” (missing data)
noisy: containing noise, errors, or outliers
e.g., Salary=“−10” (an error)
inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or names, e.g.,
Age=“42”, Birthday=“03/07/2010”
Was rating “1, 2, 3”, now rating “A, B, C”
discrepancy between duplicate records
Intentional (e.g., disguised missing data)
Jan. 1 as everyone’s birthday?
4
Incomplete (Missing) Data
Data is not always available
E.g., many tuples have no recorded value for several
attributes, such as customer income in sales data
Missing data may be due to
equipment malfunction
inconsistent with other recorded data and thus deleted
data not entered due to misunderstanding
certain data may not be considered important at the
time of entry
not register history or changes of the data
Missing data may need to be inferred
5
How to Handle Missing Data?
Ignore the tuple: usually done when class label is missing
(when doing classification)—not effective when the % of
missing values per attribute varies considerably
Fill in the missing value manually: tedious + infeasible?
Fill in it automatically with
a global constant : e.g., “unknown”, a new class?!
the attribute mean
the attribute mean for all samples belonging to the
same class: smarter
the most probable value: inference-based such as
Bayesian formula or decision tree
6
Noisy Data
Noise: random error or variance in a measured variable
Incorrect attribute values may be due to
faulty data collection instruments
data entry problems
data transmission problems
technology limitation
inconsistency in naming convention
Other data problems which require data cleaning
duplicate records
incomplete data
inconsistent data
7
How to Handle Noisy Data?
Binning
first sort data and partition into (equal-frequency) bins
then one can smooth by bin means, smooth by bin
median, smooth by bin boundaries, etc.
Regression
smooth by fitting the data into regression functions
Clustering
detect and remove outliers
Combined computer and human inspection
detect suspicious values and check by human (e.g.,
deal with possible outliers)
8
Data Cleaning as a Process
Data discrepancy detection
Use metadata (e.g., domain, range, dependency, distribution)
Check field overloading
Check uniqueness rule, consecutive rule and null rule
Use commercial tools
Data scrubbing: use simple domain knowledge (e.g., postal
code, spell-check) to detect errors and make corrections
Data auditing: by analyzing data to discover rules and
relationship to detect violators (e.g., correlation and clustering
to find outliers)
Data migration and integration
Data migration tools: allow transformations to be specified
ETL (Extraction/Transformation/Loading) tools: allow users to
specify transformations through a graphical user interface
Integration of the two processes
Iterative and interactive (e.g., Potter’s Wheels)
9
Data Integration
Data integration:
Combines data from multiple sources into a coherent store
Schema integration: e.g., A.cust-id B.cust-#
Integrate metadata from different sources
Entity identification problem:
Identify real world entities from multiple data sources, e.g., Bill
Clinton = William Clinton
Detecting and resolving data value conflicts
For the same real world entity, attribute values from different
sources are different
Possible reasons: different representations, different scales, e.g.,
metric vs. British units
10
Handling Redundancy in Data Integration
Redundant data occur often when integration of multiple
databases
Object identification: The same attribute or object
may have different names in different databases
Derivable data: One attribute may be a “derived”
attribute in another table, e.g., annual revenue
Redundant attributes may be able to be detected by
correlation analysis and covariance analysis
Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may
help reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and
improve mining speed and quality
11
Correlation Analysis (Nominal Data)
Χ2 (chi-square) test
(Observed Expected ) 2
2
Expected
The larger the Χ2 value, the more likely the variables are
related
The cells that contribute the most to the Χ2 value are
those whose actual count is very different from the
expected count
Correlation does not imply causality
# of hospitals and # of car-theft in a city are correlated
Both are causally linked to the third variable: population
12
Chi-Square Calculation: An Example
Play chess Not play chess Sum (row)
Like science fiction 250(90) 200(360) 450
Not like science fiction 50(210) 1000(840) 1050
Sum(col.) 300 1200 1500
Χ2 (chi-square) calculation (numbers in parenthesis are
expected counts calculated based on the data distribution
in the two categories) Expected count= row total* col total
/Grand total
(250 90) 2 (50 210) 2 (200 360) 2 (1000 840) 2
2
507.93
90 210 360 840
It shows that like_science_fiction and play_chess are
correlated in the group
13
04/20/24 14
