Reading 3 (Aug 29)

Data

Goal

Data itself is naively overlooked in many data mining studies. Educate yourself about the important issues of data. Understand the common attribute types, types of datasets, issues about data quality (the elephant in the room), and data exploration via summary statistics.

Instructions

Your assignment is to read the following chapters of our texts. We will discuss these in class on Wednesday, Aug 31.

• Read Introduction to Data Mining (DM) chapter 2, sections 2.1 and 2.2 (pages 19 - 44, Types of Data, Data Quality).
• Read DM chapter 3, through section 3.2 (pages 97 - 105, The Iris Data Set, Summary Statistics).
• Investigate the Web sites and references from Beautiful Data (BD) chapter 1, Seeing Your Life in Data.

Lastly, do a little research to enable you to answer the question, "What are some common dataset 'formats' encountered in the data mining world?" (for example, one 'format' is a CSV file).

Grading criteria

• 1 Participation Point: You must participate in our discussion on Wednesday, Aug 31.