Why Data Preprocessing?
► Data in the real world is dirty
incomplete: lacking attribute values, lacking certain attributes of
interest, or containing only aggregate data
e.g., occupation=“ ”
noisy: containing errors or outliers
e.g., Salary=“-10”
inconsistent: containing discrepancies in codes or names
e.g., Age=“42” Birthday=“03/07/1997”
e.g., Was rating “1,2,3”, now rating “A, B, C”
e.g., discrepancy between duplicate records
Why Is Data Dirty?
Incomplete data may come from
“Not applicable” data value when collected
Different considerations between the time when the data was
collected and when it is analyzed.
Human/hardware/software problems
Noisy data (incorrect values) may come from
Faulty data collection instruments
Human or computer error at data entry
Errors in data transmission
Inconsistent data may come from
Different data sources
Functional dependency violation (e.g., modify some linked data)
Duplicate records also need data cleaning
Why Is Data Preprocessing Important?
■ No quality data, no quality mining results!
o Quality decisions must be based on quality data
e.g., duplicate or missing data may cause incorrect or even
misleading statistics.
o Data warehouse needs consistent integration of quality data
■ Data extraction, cleaning, and transformation comprises the majority of the
work of building a data warehouse.
Multi-Dimensional Measure of Data Quality
► A well-accepted multidimensional view:
Accuracy
Completeness
Consistency
Timeliness
Believability
Value added
Interpretability
Accessibility
► Broad categories:
Intrinsic, contextual, representational, and accessibility.
Major Tasks in Data Preprocessing
Data cleaning
o Fill in missing values, smooth noisy data, identify or remove outliers,
and resolve inconsistencies
Data integration
o Integration of multiple databases, data cubes, or files
Data reduction
o Obtains reduced representation in volume but produces the same or
similar analytical results
Forms of Data Preprocessing
Data Cleaning
1. Importance
“Data cleaning is one of the three biggest problems in data
warehousing”—Ralph Kimball
“Data cleaning is the number one problem in data warehousing”—
DCI survey
2. Data cleaning tasks
Fill in missing values
Identify outliers and smooth out noisy data
Correct inconsistent data
Resolve redundancy caused by data integration
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: 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.
Noisy Data
Noise: random error or variance in a measured variable
Incorrect attribute values may 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
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
Handling Redundancy in Data Integration
o 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
o Redundant attributes may be able to be detected by correlation analysis
o Careful integration of the data from multiple sources may help
reduce/avoid redundancies and inconsistencies and improve mining speed
and quality
Data Reduction Strategies
◇ Why data reduction?
⇰ A database/data 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
⇰ Obtain a reduced representation of the data set that is much smaller
in volume but yet produce the same (or almost the same) analytical
results
◇ Data reduction strategies
⇰ Data cube aggregation:
⇰ Dimensionality reduction — e.g., remove unimportant attributes
⇰ Data Compression
⇰ Numerosity reduction — e.g., fit data into models
⇰ Discretization and concept hierarchy generation
