Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

3.3 Data Integration

Data mining often requires data integration—the merging of data from multiple data stores. Careful integration can help reduce and avoid redundancies and inconsistencies in the resulting data set. This can help improve the accuracy and speed of the subsequent data mining process.

The semantic heterogeneity and structure of data pose great challenges in data integration. How can we match schema and objects from different sources? This is the essence of the entity identification problem, described in Section 3.3.1. Are any attributes correlated? Section 3.3.2 presents correlation tests for numeric and nominal data. Tuple duplication is described in Section 3.3.3. Finally, Section 3.3.4 touches on the detection and resolution ...