Exploring Data

6th Semester
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Jorhat Engineering college
 Introduction
• A preliminary exploration of the data is done
–To better understand its characteristics
• Key motivations of data exploration include
• Helping to select the right tool for pre-processing or analysis
• Making use of humans’ abilities to recognize patterns
• People can recognize patterns not captured by data analysis
tools
 Techniques
• Techniques used in Data Exploration
• In Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
–The focus is on visualization
–Clustering and anomaly detection are viewed as exploratory
techniques
• Major areas of interest in data mining and not thought of as
just exploratory
 Iris Sample Data Set
• Many of the exploratory data analysis techniques are
–Illustrated with the Iris Plant data set
• Three flower types (Classes)
• Setosa
• Virginica
• Versicolour
• Four attributes (Non-class)
• Sepal width and length
• Petal width and length
 Summary Statistics
• Summary statistics
• Numbers that summarize properties of the data
• Summarized properties include frequency, location and spread
• Examples
• Location - Mean
• Spread ­Standard deviation
– Most summary statistics can be calculated
• In a single pass through the data
 Summary Statistics
• Frequency and Mode
–The frequency of an attribute value is
• The percentage of time the value occurs in the data set
• For example, for given the attribute ‘gender’ and a
representative population of people, the ‘female’ occurs about
50% of the times
–The mode of an attribute is the most frequent attribute value
–The notions of frequency and mode are
• Typically used with categorical data
 Summary Statistics
• Percentiles
• For continuous data, the notion of a percentile is more useful
• A measure used to indicate the value below which a given
percentage of observations in a group of observations fall.
• Example
• The 20th percentile is the value (or score) below which
• 20% of the observations may be found
 Summary Statistics
• 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

• Therefore, the median or a trimmed mean is also commonly

used
 Summary Statistics
• 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

• Therefore, the median or a trimmed mean is also commonly

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

• Because of outliers, other measures are often used

 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
• 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
 Visualization
• Example: Sea Surface Temperature
• The following shows the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) for July
1982
• Thousands of data points are summarized in a single figure
 Representation
• 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 etc.
• Examples
• Objects are often represented as points
• Their attribute values can be represented as the position or
characteristics of the points e.g., color, size, and shape
• If position is used
–The relationships of points can be easily perceived i.e., whether
they form groups or a point is an outlier
 Arrangement
• The placement of visual elements within a display
• Can make a large difference in
• How easy it is to understand the data
• Example
 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
• ExamplePetal Width (10 and 20 bins, respectively)
 Two-­Dimensional Histograms
• Show the joint distribution of the values of two attributes
• Example
• Petal width and petal length
 Visualization Techniques: Box Plots
• Box Plots
• Another way of displaying the distribution of data
• Following figure shows the basic part of a box plot
 Visualization Techniques: Box Plots
• Box plots can be used
–To compare attributes
Visualization Techniques: Scatter Plots
• Scatter plots
• Attributes values determine the position
• Two-dimensional scatter plots most common
• But, three-dimensional scatter plots can also be used
• 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
Scatter Plot Array of Iris Attributes
 Visualization Techniques: Contour Plots
• Contour plots
• Useful when a continuous attribute is measured on a spatial grid
• They partition the plane into regions of similar values
• The contour lines that form the boundaries of these regions
–Connect points with equal values
• The most common example is contour maps of elevation
• Can also display temperature, rainfall, air pressure etc.
• Example
• Sea Surface Temperature (SST)
Visualization Techniques: Contour Plots
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
• – 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
Visualization Techniques: Matrix Plots
Visualization of the Iris Data Matrix
Visualization Techniques: Parallel Coordinates
• 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
Parallel Coordinates Plots for Iris Data
 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
• ● 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
• – Each object becomes a separate face
• – Relies on human’s ability to distinguish faces
Other Visualization Techniques

Setosa

Versicolour

Virginica
Chernoff Faces for Iris Data

Setosa

Versicolour

Virginica
 OLAP
• On-­Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) was
• proposed by E. F. Codd, the father of the
• relational database.
• ● 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
• Converting tabular data into a multidimensional array:
– Identify which attributes are to be the dimensions and which
attribute is to be the target attribute
• Attributes used as dimensions must have discrete values
• Values of target variable appear as entries in the array
• The target value is typically a count or continuous value
• Can have no target variable at all except the count of objects
that have the same set of attribute values
– Find the value of each entry in the multidimensional array by
summing the values (of the target attribute) or the count of all
objects that have the attribute values corresponding to that entry
 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
 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
• 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
 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 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
• There are 3 two-­dimensional aggregates (3 choose 2 )
– 3 one-­dimensional aggregates, and
– 1 zero-­dimensional aggregate (the overall total)
 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
 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 sub-array from the complete array
• In practice, both operations can also be accompanied by aggregation
over some dimensions
 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
– 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
– Likewise, we can drill down or roll up on the location or product ID
attributes