What is data exploration?

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

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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
– Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
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 Iris Sample Data Set
• Many of the exploratory data techniques are illustrated with
the Iris Plant data set.
• Three flower types (classes):
• Setosa
• Virginica
• Versicolour
– Four (non-class) attributes
• Sepal width and length
• Petal width and length

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 Summary Statistics
• Summary statistics are 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

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 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.
• The mode of a an attribute is the most frequent
attribute value
• The notions of frequency and mode are
typically used with categorical data
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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.

• 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

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 Example: Sea Surface Temperature
• The following shows the Sea Surface
Temperature (SST) for July 1982
– 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
– If position is used, then the relationships of points,
i.e., whether they form groups or a point is an
outlier, is easily perceived.
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 Arrangement
• Is the placement of visual elements within a
display
• Can make a large difference in how easy it is to
understand the data
• Example:

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 Selection
• Is the elimination or the de-emphasis of certain
objects and attributes
• Selection may involve the chossing a subset of
attributes
– Dimensionality reduction is often used to reduce
the number of dimensions to two or three
– Alternatively, pairs of attributes can be considered
• Selection may also involve choosing a subset of
objects
– A region of the screen can only show so many
points
– Can sample, but want to preserve points in sparse
areas
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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
• Example: Petal Width (10 and 20 bins, respectively)

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 Two-Dimensional Histograms
• Show the joint distribution of the values of two
attributes
• 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
outlier

10th percentile

75th percentile

50th percentile
25th percentile

10th percentile

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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: Contour
• Contour plots 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.
• An example for Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is
provided on the next slide
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 Contour Plot Example: SST Dec, 1998

Celsius

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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
– 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

standard
deviation
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Visualization of the Iris Correlation Matrix

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 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
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 Parallel Coordinates Plots for Iris Data

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 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
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 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.
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 Creating a Multidimensional Array
• Two key steps in converting tabular data into a
multidimensional array.
– 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.
• The figure illustrates
the result.
• All non-specified
tuples are 0.

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 Example: Iris data (continued)
• Slices of the multidimensional array are shown
by the following cross-tabulations
• What do these tables tell us?

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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
dimensions, the result will be a one-dimensional
entry with three entries, each of which gives the
number of flowers of each type.
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 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)
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 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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 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.
• In practice, both operations can also be
accompanied by aggregation over some
dimensions.
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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
– A year contains months which contains day
– A country contains a state which contains a city

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 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.

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