Data preparation basic models

Abstract

The basic preprocessing steps carried out in Data Mining convert real-world data to a computer readable format. An overall overview related to this topic is given in Sect. 3.1. When there are several or heterogeneous sources of data, an integration of the data is needed to be performed. This task is discussed in Sect. 3.2. After the data is computer readable and constitutes an unique source, it usually goes through a cleaning phase where the data inaccuracies are corrected. Section 3.3 focuses in the latter task. Finally, some Data Mining applications involve some particular constraints like ranges for the data features, which may imply the normalization of the features (Sect. 3.4) or the transformation of the features of the data distribution (Sect. 3.5). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.