Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

4.5 Data Generalization by Attribute-Oriented Induction

Conceptually, the data cube can be viewed as a kind of multidimensional data generalization. In general, data generalization summarizes data by replacing relatively low-level values (e.g., numeric values for an attribute age) with higher-level concepts (e.g., young, middle-aged, and senior), or by reducing the number of dimensions to summarize data in concept space involving fewer dimensions (e.g., removingbirth_dateand telephone number when summarizing the behavior of a group of students). Given the large amount of data stored in databases, it is useful to be able to describe concepts in concise and succinct terms at generalized (rather than low) levels of abstraction. Allowing data sets ...