Applied Data Mining

CHAPTER 3

Data Preparation

Data preparation is the start of the data mining process. The data mining

results heavily rely on the data quality prepared before the mining process.

It is a process that involves many different tasks and which cannot be fully

automated. Many of the data preparation activities are routine, tedious, and

time consuming. It has been estimated that data preparation accounts for

60 percent to 80 percent of the time spent on a data mining project. Figure

3.0.1 shows the main steps of data mining. From the fi gure, we can see that

the data preparation takes an important role in data mining.

Data preparation is essential for ...