Data Mining:

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.
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 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

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

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

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 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.
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 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

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

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 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
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 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
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 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

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 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
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 Basic Statistical Descriptions of Data
 For data preprocessing to be successful, it is essential to
have an overall picture of your data.
 Basic statistical descriptions can be used to identify
 properties of the data
 highlight noise or outliers
 Three areas of basic statistical descriptions.
 Measures of Central Tendency: Middle or center of a data
distribution. (where do most of its values fall) e.g. mean,
median, mode.
 Dispersion of the data: how are the data spread out? (range,
quartiles, boxplots; and the variance and standard deviation of the data )
 Graphic displays of basic statistical descriptions: to visually
inspect our data. (bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs, histograms,
and scatter plots etc.)

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 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

 Weighted arithmetic mean: The weights reflect the w x i i

significance, importance, or occurrence frequency x i 1

n

attached to their respective values. w

i 1
i

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 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Issues: A major problem with the mean is its sensitivity to extreme (e.g.,
outlier) values.
 For example, the mean salary at a company may be substantially pushed up
by that of a few highly paid managers.
 Similarly, the mean score of a class in an exam could be pulled down quite a
bit by a few very low scores.

 Trimmed mean: Mean obtained after chopping off values at the high and low
extremes, to offset the effect caused by a small number of extreme values.
 For example, we can sort the values observed for salary and remove the top
and bottom 2% before computing the mean.
 We should avoid trimming too large a portion (such as 20%) at both ends,
as this can result in the loss of valuable information

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 Measuring the Central Tendency
 Median:
 Middle value if odd number of values, or average of
the middle two values otherwise
 Estimated by interpolation (for grouped data)
 The mode for a set of data is the value that occurs
most frequently in the set
 Mode
 Value that occurs most frequently in the data
 Unimodal, bimodal, trimodal
 A data set with two or more modes is multimodal
 At the other extreme, if each data value occurs only
once, then there is no mode

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Symmetric vs. Skewed Data
 Median, mean and mode of symmetric, symmetric
positively and negatively skewed data

positively skewed negatively skewed

May 24, 2024 Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques 16