Data Mining: Exploring Data

Lecture Notes for Chapter 3

Introduction to Data Mining

by
Tan, Steinbach, Kumar
What is data exploration?

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 A preliminary exploration of the data to
better understand its characteristics.
Key motivations of data exploration include
– Helping to select the right tool for preprocessing or analysis
– Making use of humans’ abilities to recognize patterns
◆ People can recognize patterns not captured by data analysis
tools

Related to the area of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)

– Created by statistician John Tukey
– Seminal book is Exploratory Data Analysis by Tukey
– A nice online introduction can be found in Chapter 1 of the NIST
Engineering Statistics Handbook
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/index.htm

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 Techniques Used In Data Exploration

In EDA, as originally defined by Tukey

– The focus was on visualization
– Clustering and anomaly detection were viewed as
exploratory techniques
– In data mining, clustering and anomaly detection are
major areas of interest, and not thought of as just
exploratory

In our discussion of data exploration, we focus on

– Summary statistics
– Visualization
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 – Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
Iris Sample Data Set

Many of the exploratory data techniques are illustrated

with the Iris Plant data set.
– Can be obtained from the UCI Machine Learning Repository
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mlearn/MLRepository.html – From the
statistician Douglas Fisher –
Three flower types (classes):
◆ Setosa
◆ Virginica
◆ Versicolour
– Four (non-class) attributes

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 ◆ Sepal width and length ◆ Petal width and length Virginica. Robert H.
Mohlenbrock. USDA
NRCS. 1995. Northeast wetland flora: Field
office guide to plant species. Northeast National
Technical Center, Chester, PA. Courtesy of USDA
NRCS Wetland Science Institute.

More on sepal and petal

Peltal: Flower Leaf

Sepal: one of the group of leaves outside the
coloured petals of flowers
– In many flowers, sepals are green and only petals are
colourful

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 – For Iris, sepals are also
colourful.
– For Virginica Iris, the sepals
are larger than petals and are
drooping
– Petals are upright now
Summary Statistics

Summary statistics are numbers that summarize

properties of the data

– Summarized properties include frequency, location and

spread
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 ◆ Examples: location - mean
spread - standard deviation

– Most summary statistics can be calculated in a single

pass through the data
Frequency and Mode

The frequency of an attribute value is the

percentage of time the value occurs in the
data set
– For example, given the attribute ‘gender’ and a
representative population of people, the gender
‘female’ occurs about 50% of the time.
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 The mode of a an attribute is the most frequent
attribute value
The notions of frequency and mode are typically
used with categorical data
Percentiles

For continuous data, the notion of a percentile is

more useful.

Given a continuous attribute x and a number p

between 0 and 100, the pth percentile is a value

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 of x such that xpp% of the observed values of x
are

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 less than . xp

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 For instance, the 50th percentile is the value
x50% such that 50% of all values of x are less than
. x50%

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 Measures of Location: Mean and Median
The mean is the most common measure of the
location of a set of points.
However, the mean is very sensitive to outliers.
Thus, the median or a trimmed mean is also
commonly used.

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 Measures of Spread: Range and Variance
Range is the difference between the max and min
The variance or standard deviation is the most
common measure of the spread of a set of points.

However, this is also sensitive to outliers, so that other

measures, absolute avg deviation and median absolute
deviation are often used.

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 Visualization

Visualization is the conversion of data into a visual

or tabular format so that the characteristics of the
data and the relationships among data items or
attributes can be analyzed or reported.

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 Visualization of data is one of the most powerful
and appealing techniques for data exploration.
– Humans have a well developed ability to analyze large
amounts of information that is presented visually
– Can detect general patterns and trends
– Can detect outliers and unusual patterns
Example: Sea Surface Temperature

The following shows the Sea Surface

Temperature (SST) for July 1982

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 – Tens of thousands of data points are summarized in a
single
figure

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 Representation

Is the mapping of information to a visual

format
Data objects, their attributes, and the relationships
among data objects are translated into graphical
elements such as points, lines, shapes, and
colors.
Example:
– Objects are often represented as points
– Their attribute values can be represented as the
position of the points or the characteristics of the
points, e.g., color, size, and shape
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 – If position is used, then the relationships of points, i.e.,
whether they form groups or a point is an outlier, is
easily perceived.
Arrangement

Is the placement of visual elements within a

display
Can make a large difference in how easy it is to

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 understand the data

Example:

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 Stem and Leaf Plots

Stem and leaf plots can be used to provide insight

into the distribution of one-dimensional integer or
continuous data
– We split the values into groups, where each group
contains those values that are same except the last
digit.
– Each group becomes a stem while the last digits of a
group are the leaves.
– If the values are two-digits, e.g., 35, 36, 42 and 51 then
the stems will be the high-order digits, e.g., 3,4 and 5

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 while the leaves are the low-order digits, e.g., 1, 2, 5
and 6.
Stem and Leaf Plots (Example)

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 Visualization Techniques: Histograms

Histogram
– Usually shows the distribution of values of a single variable
– Divide the values into bins and show a bar plot of the number of
objects in each bin.
– The height of each bar indicates the number of objects
– Shape of histogram depends on the number of bins

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 E xample
: Petal Width (10 and 20 bins, respectively)
Two-Dimensional Histograms
Show the joint distribution of the values of two
attributes

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 Example: petal width and petal length
– What does this tell us?

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 Visualization Techniques: Box Plots

Box Plots
– Invented by J. Tukey
– Another way of displaying the distribution of data –
Following figure shows the basic part of a box plot

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 10th percentile

75th percentile

50th percentile
25th percentile

10th percentile
outlier

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 Example of Box Plots
Box plots can be used to compare attributes

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 Visualization Techniques: Scatter Plots

Scatter plots
– Attributes values determine the position
– Two-dimensional scatter plots most common, but can
have three-dimensional scatter plots
– Often additional attributes can be displayed by using
the size, shape, and color of the markers that
represent the objects
– It is useful to have arrays of scatter plots can
compactly summarize the relationships of several pairs
of attributes
◆ See example on the next slide

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 Scatter Plot Array of Iris Attributes

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 Visualization Techniques: Matrix Plots

Matrix plots
– Can plot the data matrix
– This can be useful when objects are sorted according
to class
– Typically, the attributes are normalized to prevent one
attribute from dominating the plot
◆ Often standardized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1
– Plots of similarity or distance matrices can also be
useful for visualizing the relationships between objects
– Examples of matrix plots are presented on the next two
slides
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 Visualization of the Iris Data Matrix

•The setosa have petal

length and width well
below the average
•Versicolour have length
and width around
average
•Virginica have above
average

standard
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 Deviation or Score?

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Visualization of the Iris Correlation Matrix

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 Visualization Techniques: Parallel Coordinates
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 Parallel Coordinates
– Used to plot the attribute values of high-dimensional
data
– Instead of using perpendicular axes, use a set of
parallel axes
– The attribute values of each object are plotted as a
point on each corresponding coordinate axis and the
points are connected by a line
– Thus, each object is represented as a line
– Often, the lines representing a distinct class of objects
group together, at least for some attributes
– Ordering of attributes is important in seeing such
groupings

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 Parallel Coordinates Plots for Iris Data

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 The classes are reasonably well separated for
petal length and width rather than sepal length
and width

Other Visualization Techniques

Star Plots
– Similar approach to parallel coordinates, but axes
radiate from a central point
– The line connecting the values of an object is a
polygon

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© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining
 Chernoff Faces (Continued…)

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 Chernoff Faces (Continued…)

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 Other Visualization Technique: Chernoff Faces

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 Chernoff Faces
– Approach created by Herman Chernoff.
– This approach associates each attribute with a
characteristic of a face
– The values of each attribute determine the appearance
of the corresponding facial characteristic
◆sepal length: size of the face,
◆sepal width: forehead/jaw relative arc length,
◆petal length: shape of forehead,
◆petal width: shape of jaw
– Each object becomes a separate face
– Relies on human’s ability to distinguish faces

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Star Plots for Iris Data

Setosa
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 Versicolour

Virginica

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Chernoff Faces for Iris Data

Setosa
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 Versicolour

Virginica

OLAP

On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) was

proposed by E. F. Codd, the father of the relational
database.
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 Relational databases put data into tables, while
OLAP uses a multidimensional array
representation.
– Such representations of data previously existed in
statistics and other fields
There are a number of data analysis and data
exploration operations that are easier with such a
data representation.
Creating a Multidimensional Array

Two key steps in converting tabular data into a

multidimensional array.
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 – First, identify which attributes are to be the dimensions
and which attribute is to be the target attribute whose
values appear as entries in the multidimensional array.
◆ The attributes used as dimensions must have discrete values
◆ The target value is typically a count or continuous value, e.g.,
the cost of an item
◆ Can have no target variable at all except the count of objects
that have the same set of attribute values
– Second, find the value of each entry in the
multidimensional array by summing the values (of the
target attribute) or count of all objects that have the
attribute values corresponding to that entry.

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 Example: Iris data

We show how the attributes, petal length,

petal width, and species type can be
converted to a multidimensional array
– First, we discretized the petal width and length to have
categorical values: low, medium, and high
– We get the following table - note the count attribute

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 Example: Iris data (continued)

Each unique tuple of petal width, petal length, and

species type identifies one element of the array.
This element is assigned the corresponding count
value.
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 The figure
illustrates the
result.
All non-specified
tuples are 0.
Example: Iris
data (continued)

Slices of the multidimensional array are shown by

the following cross-tabulations

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 What do these tables tell us?
Setosa Versicolour

Virginica

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 OLAP Operations: Data Cube
The key operation of a OLAP is the formation of a
data cube
A data cube is a multidimensional
representation of data, together with all possible
aggregates. By all possible aggregates, we
mean the aggregates that result by selecting a
proper subset of the dimensions and summing
over all remaining dimensions.
For example, if we choose the species type
dimension of the Iris data and sum over all other
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 dimensions, the result will be a one-dimensional
entry with three entries, each of which gives the
number of flowers of each type.
Data Cube Example

Consider a data set that records the sales of

products at a number of company stores at
various dates.
This data can be represented
as a 3 dimensional array

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 Data Cube Example From Raghu Ramakrishnan

More Example From DBMS: Raghu Ramakrishnan Book

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© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining
 Data Cube Example (continued)
The following figure table shows one of the two
dimensional aggregates, along with two of the

one-dimensional aggregates, and the overall total

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 Example (Continued..)

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 Example (Continued..)

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 Example (Continued..)

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 Example (Continued…)

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© Tan,Steinbach, Kumar Introduction to Data Mining
 OLAP Operations: Slicing and Dicing

Slicing is selecting a group of cells from the entire

multidimensional array by specifying a specific
value for one or more dimensions.
Dicing involves selecting a subset of cells by
specifying a range of attribute values.
– This is equivalent to defining a subarray from the
complete array.

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 OLAP Operations: Roll-up and Drill-down

Attribute values often have a hierarchical

structure.
– Each date is associated with a year, month, and
week.
– A location is associated with a continent, country,
state (province, etc.), and city.
– Products can be divided into various categories, such
as clothing, electronics, and furniture.
Note that these categories often nest and form a
tree or lattice
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 – A year contains months which contains day
– A country contains a state which contains a city
OLAP Operations: Roll-up and Drill-down

This hierarchical structure gives rise to the roll-up

and drill-down operations.
– For sales data, we can aggregate (roll up) the sales
across all the dates in a month.
– Conversely, given a view of the data where the time
dimension is broken into months, we could split the
monthly sales totals (drill down) into daily sales
totals.

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 – Likewise, we can drill down or roll up on the location
or product ID attributes.

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