January 14, 2014 1

Data Mining:
Concepts and Techniques
Chapter 7

January 14, 2014 2
Chapter 7. Classification and
Prediction
What is classification? What is prediction?
Issues regarding classification and prediction
Classification by decision tree induction
Bayesian Classification
Classification by backpropagation
Classification based on concepts from association rule
mining
Other Classification Methods
Prediction
Classification accuracy
Summary
January 14, 2014 3
Classification:
predicts categorical class labels
classifies data (constructs a model) based on the
training set and the values (class labels) in a
classifying attribute and uses it in classifying new data
Prediction:
models continuous-valued functions, i.e., predicts
unknown or missing values
Typical Applications
credit approval
target marketing
medical diagnosis
treatment effectiveness analysis
Classification vs. Prediction
January 14, 2014 4
ClassificationA Two-Step Process
Model construction: describing a set of predetermined classes
Each tuple/sample is assumed to belong to a predefined class,
as determined by the class label attribute
The set of tuples used for model construction: training set
The model is represented as classification rules, decision trees,
or mathematical formulae
Model usage: for classifying future or unknown objects
Estimate accuracy of the model
The known label of test sample is compared with the
classified result from the model
Accuracy rate is the percentage of test set samples that are
correctly classified by the model
Test set is independent of training set, otherwise over-fitting
will occur
January 14, 2014 5
Classification Process (1): Model
Construction
Training
Data
NAME RANK YEARS TENURED
Mike Assistant Prof 3 no
Mary Assistant Prof 7 yes
Bill Professor 2 yes
Jim Associate Prof 7 yes
Dave Assistant Prof 6 no
Anne Associate Prof 3 no
Classification
Algorithms
IF rank = professor
OR years > 6
THEN tenured = yes
Classifier
(Model)
January 14, 2014 6
Classification Process (2): Use the
Model in Prediction
Classifier
Testing
Data
NAME RANK YEARS TENURED
Tom Assistant Prof 2 no
Merlisa Associate Prof 7 no
George Professor 5 yes
Joseph Assistant Prof 7 yes
Unseen Data
(Jeff, Professor, 4)
Tenured?
January 14, 2014 7
Supervised vs. Unsupervised
Learning
Supervised learning (classification)
Supervision: The training data (observations,
measurements, etc.) are accompanied by labels
indicating the class of the observations
New data is classified based on the training set
Unsupervised learning (clustering)
The class labels of training data is unknown
Given a set of measurements, observations, etc. with
the aim of establishing the existence of classes or
clusters in the data
January 14, 2014 8
Issues regarding classification and
prediction (1): Data Preparation
Data cleaning
Preprocess data in order to reduce noise and handle
missing values
Relevance analysis (feature selection)
Remove the irrelevant or redundant attributes
Data transformation
Generalize and/or normalize data
January 14, 2014 9
Issues regarding classification and prediction
(2): Evaluating Classification Methods
Predictive accuracy
Speed and scalability
time to construct the model
time to use the model
Robustness
handling noise and missing values
Scalability
efficiency in disk-resident databases
Interpretability:
understanding and insight provded by the model
Goodness of rules
decision tree size
compactness of classification rules
January 14, 2014 10
Chapter 7. Classification and
Prediction
What is classification? What is prediction?
Issues regarding classification and prediction
Classification by decision tree induction
Bayesian Classification
Classification by backpropagation
Classification based on concepts from association rule
mining
Other Classification Methods
Prediction
Classification accuracy
Summary
January 14, 2014 11
Classification by Decision Tree
Induction
Decision tree
A flow-chart-like tree structure
Internal node denotes a test on an attribute
Branch represents an outcome of the test
Leaf nodes represent class labels or class distribution
Decision tree generation consists of two phases
Tree construction
At start, all the training examples are at the root
Partition examples recursively based on selected attributes
Tree pruning
Identify and remove branches that reflect noise or outliers
Use of decision tree: Classifying an unknown sample
Test the attribute values of the sample against the decision tree
January 14, 2014 12
Training Dataset
age income student credit_rating
<=30 high no fair
<=30 high no excellent
3140 high no fair
>40 medium no fair
>40 low yes fair
>40 low yes excellent
3140 low yes excellent
<=30 medium no fair
<=30 low yes fair
>40 medium yes fair
<=30 medium yes excellent
3140 medium no excellent
3140 high yes fair
>40 medium no excellent
This
follows
an
example
from
Quinlans
ID3
January 14, 2014 13
Output: A Decision Tree for buys_computer
age?
overcast
student? credit rating?
no yes fair excellent
<=30
>40
no no yes yes
yes
30..40
January 14, 2014 14
Algorithm for Decision Tree Induction
Basic algorithm (a greedy algorithm)
Tree is constructed in a top-down recursive divide-and-conquer
manner
At start, all the training examples are at the root
Attributes are categorical (if continuous-valued, they are
discretized in advance)
Examples are partitioned recursively based on selected attributes
Test attributes are selected on the basis of a heuristic or
statistical measure (e.g., information gain)
Conditions for stopping partitioning
All samples for a given node belong to the same class
There are no remaining attributes for further partitioning
majority voting is employed for classifying the leaf
There are no samples left
January 14, 2014 15
Attribute Selection Measure
Information gain (ID3/C4.5)
All attributes are assumed to be categorical
Can be modified for continuous-valued attributes
Gini index (IBM IntelligentMiner)
All attributes are assumed continuous-valued
Assume there exist several possible split values for each
attribute
May need other tools, such as clustering, to get the
possible split values
Can be modified for categorical attributes
January 14, 2014 16
Information Gain (ID3/C4.5)
Select the attribute with the highest information gain
Assume there are two classes, P and N
Let the set of examples S contain p elements of class P
and n elements of class N
The amount of information, needed to decide if an
arbitrary example in S belongs to P or N is defined as


n p
n
n p
n
n p
p
n p
p
n p I
+ +

+ +
=
2 2
log log ) , (
January 14, 2014 17
Information Gain in Decision
Tree Induction
Assume that using attribute A a set S will be partitioned
into sets {S
1
, S
2
, , S
v
}
If S
i
contains p
i
examples of P and n
i
examples of N,
the entropy, or the expected information needed to
classify objects in all subtrees S
i
is


The encoding information that would be gained by
branching on A

=
+
+
=
v
1
) , ( ) (
i
i i
i i
n p I
n p
n p
A E
) ( ) , ( ) ( A E n p I A Gain =
January 14, 2014 18
Attribute Selection by Information
Gain Computation
Class P: buys_computer =
yes
Class N: buys_computer =
no
I(p, n) = I(9, 5) =0.940
Compute the entropy for age:









Hence


Similarly
age p
i
n
i
I(p
i
, n
i
)
<=30 2 3 0.971
3040 4 0 0
>40 3 2 0.971
69 . 0 ) 2 , 3 (
14
5
) 0 , 4 (
14
4
) 3 , 2 (
14
5
) (
= +
+ =
I
I I age E
048 . 0 ) _ (
151 . 0 ) (
029 . 0 ) (
=
=
=
rating credit Gain
student Gain
income Gain
) ( ) , ( ) ( age E n p I age Gain =
January 14, 2014 19
Gini Index (IBM IntelligentMiner)
If a data set T contains examples from n classes, gini index,
gini(T) is defined as

where p
j
is the relative frequency of class j in T.
If a data set T is split into two subsets T
1
and T
2
with sizes
N
1
and N
2
respectively, the gini index of the split data
contains examples from n classes, the gini index gini(T) is
defined as


The attribute provides the smallest gini
split
(T) is chosen to
split the node (need to enumerate all possible splitting
points for each attribute).

=
=
n
j
p
j
T gini
1
2
1 ) (
) ( ) ( ) (
2
2
1
1
T
gini
N
N
T
gini
N
N
T
gini
split
+ =
January 14, 2014 20
Extracting Classification Rules from Trees
Represent the knowledge in the form of IF-THEN rules
One rule is created for each path from the root to a leaf
Each attribute-value pair along a path forms a conjunction
The leaf node holds the class prediction
Rules are easier for humans to understand
Example
IF age = <=30 AND student = no THEN buys_computer = no
IF age = <=30 AND student = yes THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = 3140 THEN buys_computer = yes
IF age = >40 AND credit_rating = excellent THEN
buys_computer = yes
IF age = >40 AND credit_rating = fair THEN buys_computer =
no
January 14, 2014 21
Avoid Overfitting in Classification
The generated tree may overfit the training data
Too many branches, some may reflect anomalies
due to noise or outliers
Result is in poor accuracy for unseen samples
Two approaches to avoid overfitting
Prepruning: Halt tree construction earlydo not split
a node if this would result in the goodness measure
falling below a threshold
Difficult to choose an appropriate threshold
Postpruning: Remove branches from a fully grown
treeget a sequence of progressively pruned trees
Use a set of data different from the training data
to decide which is the best pruned tree
January 14, 2014 22
Approaches to Determine the Final
Tree Size
Separate training (2/3) and testing (1/3) sets
Use cross validation, e.g., 10-fold cross validation
Use all the data for training
but apply a statistical test (e.g., chi-square) to
estimate whether expanding or pruning a
node may improve the entire distribution
Use minimum description length (MDL) principle:
halting growth of the tree when the encoding
is minimized
January 14, 2014 23
Enhancements to basic decision
tree induction
Allow for continuous-valued attributes
Dynamically define new discrete-valued attributes that
partition the continuous attribute value into a discrete
set of intervals
Handle missing attribute values
Assign the most common value of the attribute
Assign probability to each of the possible values
Attribute construction
Create new attributes based on existing ones that are
sparsely represented
This reduces fragmentation, repetition, and replication
January 14, 2014 24
Classification in Large Databases
Classificationa classical problem extensively studied by
statisticians and machine learning researchers
Scalability: Classifying data sets with millions of examples
and hundreds of attributes with reasonable speed
Why decision tree induction in data mining?
relatively faster learning speed (than other classification
methods)
convertible to simple and easy to understand
classification rules
can use SQL queries for accessing databases
comparable classification accuracy with other methods
January 14, 2014 25
Scalable Decision Tree Induction
Methods in Data Mining Studies
SLIQ (EDBT96 Mehta et al.)
builds an index for each attribute and only class list and
the current attribute list reside in memory
SPRINT (VLDB96 J. Shafer et al.)
constructs an attribute list data structure
PUBLIC (VLDB98 Rastogi & Shim)
integrates tree splitting and tree pruning: stop growing
the tree earlier
RainForest (VLDB98 Gehrke, Ramakrishnan & Ganti)
separates the scalability aspects from the criteria that
determine the quality of the tree
builds an AVC-list (attribute, value, class label)
January 14, 2014 26
Data Cube-Based Decision-Tree
Induction
Integration of generalization with decision-tree induction
(Kamber et al97).
Classification at primitive concept levels
E.g., precise temperature, humidity, outlook, etc.
Low-level concepts, scattered classes, bushy
classification-trees
Semantic interpretation problems.
Cube-based multi-level classification
Relevance analysis at multi-levels.
Information-gain analysis with dimension + level.
January 14, 2014 27
Presentation of Classification Results
January 14, 2014 28
Bayesian Classification: Why?
Probabilistic learning: Calculate explicit probabilities for
hypothesis, among the most practical approaches to certain
types of learning problems
Incremental: Each training example can incrementally
increase/decrease the probability that a hypothesis is
correct. Prior knowledge can be combined with observed
data.
Probabilistic prediction: Predict multiple hypotheses,
weighted by their probabilities
Standard: Even when Bayesian methods are
computationally intractable, they can provide a standard of
optimal decision making against which other methods can
be measured
January 14, 2014 29
Bayesian Theorem
Given training data D, posteriori probability of a
hypothesis h, P(h|D) follows the Bayes theorem


MAP (maximum posteriori) hypothesis


Practical difficulty: require initial knowledge of many
probabilities, significant computational cost
) (
) ( ) | (
) | (
D P
h P h D P
D h P =
. ) ( ) | ( max arg ) | ( max arg h P h D P
H h
D h P
H h
MAP
h
e
=
e

January 14, 2014 32

Bayesian classification
The classification problem may be formalized
using a-posteriori probabilities:
P(C|X) = prob. that the sample tuple
X=<x
1
,,x
k
> is of class C.

E.g. P(class=N | outlook=sunny,windy=true,)

Idea: assign to sample X the class label C such
that P(C|X) is maximal
January 14, 2014 33
Estimating a-posteriori probabilities
Bayes theorem:
P(C|X) = P(X|C)P(C) / P(X)
P(X) is constant for all classes
P(C) = relative freq of class C samples
C such that P(C|X) is maximum =
C such that P(X|C)P(C) is maximum
Problem: computing P(X|C) is unfeasible!
January 14, 2014 34
Nave Bayesian Classification
Nave assumption: attribute independence
P(x
1
,,x
k
|C) = P(x
1
|C)P(x
k
|C)
If i-th attribute is categorical:
P(x
i
|C) is estimated as the relative freq of
samples having value x
i
as i-th attribute in class
C
If i-th attribute is continuous:
P(x
i
|C) is estimated thru a Gaussian density
function
Computationally easy in both cases
January 14, 2014 35
Play-tennis example: estimating
P(x
i
|C)
Outlook Temperature Humidity Windy Class
sunny hot high false N
sunny hot high true N
overcast hot high false P
rain mild high false P
rain cool normal false P
rain cool normal true N
overcast cool normal true P
sunny mild high false N
sunny cool normal false P
rain mild normal false P
sunny mild normal true P
overcast mild high true P
overcast hot normal false P
rain mild high true N
outlook
P(sunny|p) = 2/9 P(sunny|n) = 3/5
P(overcast|p) =
4/9
P(overcast|n) = 0
P(rain|p) = 3/9 P(rain|n) = 2/5
temperature
P(hot|p) = 2/9 P(hot|n) = 2/5
P(mild|p) = 4/9 P(mild|n) = 2/5
P(cool|p) = 3/9 P(cool|n) = 1/5
humidity
P(high|p) = 3/9 P(high|n) = 4/5
P(normal|p) =
6/9
P(normal|n) =
2/5
windy
P(true|p) = 3/9 P(true|n) = 3/5
P(false|p) = 6/9 P(false|n) = 2/5
P(p) = 9/14
P(n) = 5/14
January 14, 2014 36
Play-tennis example: classifying X
An unseen sample X = <rain, hot, high, false>

P(X|p)P(p) =
P(rain|p)P(hot|p)P(high|p)P(false|p)P(p) =
3/92/93/96/99/14 = 0.010582
P(X|n)P(n) =
P(rain|n)P(hot|n)P(high|n)P(false|n)P(n) =
2/52/54/52/55/14 = 0.018286

Sample X is classified in class n (dont play)

January 14, 2014 37
The independence hypothesis
makes computation possible
yields optimal classifiers when satisfied
but is seldom satisfied in practice, as attributes
(variables) are often correlated.
Attempts to overcome this limitation:
Bayesian networks, that combine Bayesian reasoning
with causal relationships between attributes
Decision trees, that reason on one attribute at the
time, considering most important attributes first
January 14, 2014 38
Bayesian Belief Networks (I)
Family
History
LungCancer
PositiveXRay
Smoker
Emphysema
Dyspnea
LC
~LC
(FH, S) (FH, ~S) (~FH, S) (~FH, ~S)
0.8
0.2
0.5
0.5
0.7
0.3
0.1
0.9
Bayesian Belief Networks
The conditional probability table
for the variable LungCancer
January 14, 2014 39
Bayesian Belief Networks (II)
Bayesian belief network allows a subset of the variables
conditionally independent
A graphical model of causal relationships
Several cases of learning Bayesian belief networks
Given both network structure and all the variables:
easy
Given network structure but only some variables
When the network structure is not known in advance
January 14, 2014 40
Neural Networks
Advantages
prediction accuracy is generally high
robust, works when training examples contain errors
output may be discrete, real-valued, or a vector of
several discrete or real-valued attributes
fast evaluation of the learned target function
Criticism
long training time
difficult to understand the learned function (weights)
not easy to incorporate domain knowledge
January 14, 2014 41
A Neuron
The n-dimensional input vector x is mapped into
variable y by means of the scalar product and a
nonlinear function mapping

k
-
f
weighted
sum
Input
vector x
output y
Activation
function
weight
vector w

w
0
w
1
w
n
x
0
x
1
x
n
Network Training
The ultimate objective of training
obtain a set of weights that makes almost all the
tuples in the training data classified correctly
Steps
Initialize weights with random values
Feed the input tuples into the network one by one
For each unit
Compute the net input to the unit as a linear combination
of all the inputs to the unit
Compute the output value using the activation function
Compute the error
Update the weights and the bias
Multi-Layer Perceptron
Output nodes
Input nodes
Hidden nodes
Output vector
Input vector: x
i
w
ij

+ =
i
j i ij j
O w I u
j
I
j
e
O

+
=
1
1
) )( 1 (
j j j j j
O T O O Err =
jk
k
k j j j
w Err O O Err

= ) 1 (
i j ij ij
O Err l w w ) ( + =
j j j
Err l) ( + =u u
January 14, 2014 45
Association-Based Classification
Several methods for association-based classification
ARCS: Quantitative association mining and clustering
of association rules (Lent et al97)
It beats C4.5 in (mainly) scalability and also accuracy
Associative classification: (Liu et al98)
It mines high support and high confidence rules in the form of
cond_set => y, where y is a class label
CAEP (Classification by aggregating emerging patterns)
(Dong et al99)
Emerging patterns (EPs): the itemsets whose support
increases significantly from one class to another
Mine Eps based on minimum support and growth rate
January 14, 2014 46
Other Classification Methods
k-nearest neighbor classifier
case-based reasoning
Genetic algorithm
Rough set approach
Fuzzy set approaches

January 14, 2014 47
Instance-Based Methods
Instance-based learning:
Store training examples and delay the processing
(lazy evaluation) until a new instance must be
classified
Typical approaches
k-nearest neighbor approach
Instances represented as points in a Euclidean
space.
Locally weighted regression
Constructs local approximation
Case-based reasoning
Uses symbolic representations and knowledge-
based inference
January 14, 2014 48
The k-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm
All instances correspond to points in the n-D space.
The nearest neighbor are defined in terms of
Euclidean distance.
The target function could be discrete- or real- valued.
For discrete-valued, the k-NN returns the most
common value among the k training examples nearest
to xq.
Vonoroi diagram: the decision surface induced by 1-
NN for a typical set of training examples.
.
_
+
_
xq
+
_
_
+
_
_
+
.
.
.
.
.
January 14, 2014 49
Discussion on the k-NN Algorithm
The k-NN algorithm for continuous-valued target functions
Calculate the mean values of the k nearest neighbors
Distance-weighted nearest neighbor algorithm
Weight the contribution of each of the k neighbors
according to their distance to the query point x
q

giving greater weight to closer neighbors
Similarly, for real-valued target functions
Robust to noisy data by averaging k-nearest neighbors
Curse of dimensionality: distance between neighbors could
be dominated by irrelevant attributes.
To overcome it, axes stretch or elimination of the least
relevant attributes.
w
d x
q
x
i

1
2
( , )
January 14, 2014 50
Case-Based Reasoning
Also uses: lazy evaluation + analyze similar instances
Difference: Instances are not points in a Euclidean space
Example: Water faucet problem in CADET (Sycara et al92)
Methodology
Instances represented by rich symbolic descriptions
(e.g., function graphs)
Multiple retrieved cases may be combined
Tight coupling between case retrieval, knowledge-based
reasoning, and problem solving
Research issues
Indexing based on syntactic similarity measure, and
when failure, backtracking, and adapting to additional
cases
January 14, 2014 51
Remarks on Lazy vs. Eager Learning
Instance-based learning: lazy evaluation
Decision-tree and Bayesian classification: eager evaluation
Key differences
Lazy method may consider query instance xq when deciding how to
generalize beyond the training data D
Eager method cannot since they have already chosen global
approximation when seeing the query
Efficiency: Lazy - less time training but more time predicting
Accuracy
Lazy method effectively uses a richer hypothesis space since it uses
many local linear functions to form its implicit global approximation
to the target function
Eager: must commit to a single hypothesis that covers the entire
instance space
January 14, 2014 52
Genetic Algorithms
GA: based on an analogy to biological evolution
Each rule is represented by a string of bits
An initial population is created consisting of randomly
generated rules
e.g., IF A
1
and Not A
2
then C
2
can be encoded as 100
Based on the notion of survival of the fittest, a new
population is formed to consists of the fittest rules and
their offsprings
The fitness of a rule is represented by its classification
accuracy on a set of training examples
Offsprings are generated by crossover and mutation
January 14, 2014 53
Rough Set Approach
Rough sets are used to approximately or roughly
define equivalent classes
A rough set for a given class C is approximated by two
sets: a lower approximation (certain to be in C) and an
upper approximation (cannot be described as not
belonging to C)
Finding the minimal subsets (reducts) of attributes (for
feature reduction) is NP-hard but a discernibility matrix
is used to reduce the computation intensity
January 14, 2014 54
Fuzzy Set
Approaches
Fuzzy logic uses truth values between 0.0 and 1.0 to
represent the degree of membership (such as using
fuzzy membership graph)
Attribute values are converted to fuzzy values
e.g., income is mapped into the discrete categories
{low, medium, high} with fuzzy values calculated
For a given new sample, more than one fuzzy value may
apply
Each applicable rule contributes a vote for membership
in the categories
Typically, the truth values for each predicted category
are summed
January 14, 2014 55
What Is Prediction?
Prediction is similar to classification
First, construct a model
Second, use model to predict unknown value
Major method for prediction is regression
Linear and multiple regression
Non-linear regression
Prediction is different from classification
Classification refers to predict categorical class label
Prediction models continuous-valued functions
January 14, 2014 56
Predictive modeling: Predict data values or construct
generalized linear models based on the database data.
One can only predict value ranges or category distributions
Method outline:
Minimal generalization
Attribute relevance analysis
Generalized linear model construction
Prediction
Determine the major factors which influence the prediction
Data relevance analysis: uncertainty measurement,
entropy analysis, expert judgement, etc.
Multi-level prediction: drill-down and roll-up analysis
Predictive Modeling in Databases
January 14, 2014 57
Linear regression: Y = o + | X
Two parameters , o and | specify the line and are to
be estimated by using the data at hand.
using the least squares criterion to the known values
of Y1, Y2, , X1, X2, .
Multiple regression: Y = b0 + b1 X1 + b2 X2.
Many nonlinear functions can be transformed into the
above.
Log-linear models:
The multi-way table of joint probabilities is
approximated by a product of lower-order tables.
Probability: p(a, b, c, d) = oab |ac_ad obcd
Regress Analysis and Log-Linear
Models in Prediction
January 14, 2014 58
Locally Weighted Regression
Construct an explicit approximation to f over a local region
surrounding query instance xq.
Locally weighted linear regression:
The target function f is approximated near xq using the
linear function:
minimize the squared error: distance-decreasing weight
K

the gradient descent training rule:

In most cases, the target function is approximated by a
constant, linear, or quadratic function.

( ) ( ) ( ) f x w w a x w
n
a
n
x = + + +
0 1 1

E x
q
f x f x
x k nearest neighbors of x
q
K d x
q
x ( ) ( ( )

( ))
_ _ _ _
( ( , ))
e

1
2
2
Aw
j
K d x
q
x f x f x a
j
x
x k nearest neighbors of x
q

e

q ( ( , ))(( ( )

( )) ( )
_ _ _ _
January 14, 2014 59
Prediction: Numerical Data
January 14, 2014 60
Prediction: Categorical Data
January 14, 2014 61
Classification Accuracy: Estimating Error
Rates
Partition: Training-and-testing
use two independent data sets, e.g., training set
(2/3), test set(1/3)
used for data set with large number of samples
Cross-validation
divide the data set into k subsamples
use k-1 subsamples as training data and one sub-
sample as test data --- k-fold cross-validation
for data set with moderate size
Bootstrapping (leave-one-out)
for small size data
January 14, 2014 62
Boosting and Bagging
Boosting increases classification accuracy
Applicable to decision trees or Bayesian
classifier
Learn a series of classifiers, where each
classifier in the series pays more attention to
the examples misclassified by its predecessor
Boosting requires only linear time and
constant space
January 14, 2014 63
Boosting Technique (II) Algorithm
Assign every example an equal weight 1/N
For t = 1, 2, , T Do
Obtain a hypothesis (classifier) h
(t)
under w
(t)

Calculate the error of h(t) and re-weight the
examples based on the error
Normalize w
(t+1)
to sum to 1
Output a weighted sum of all the hypothesis,
with each hypothesis weighted according to its
accuracy on the training set
January 14, 2014 64
Summary
Classification is an extensively studied problem (mainly in
statistics, machine learning & neural networks)
Classification is probably one of the most widely used
data mining techniques with a lot of extensions
Scalability is still an important issue for database
applications: thus combining classification with database
techniques should be a promising topic
Research directions: classification of non-relational data,
e.g., text, spatial, multimedia, etc..