Data Mining and Analysis Fundamental Concepts and Algorithms

Before we can mine data, it is important to first find a suitable data representation that facilitates data analysis. For example, for complex data such as text, sequences, images, and so on, we must typically extract or construct a set of attributes or features, so that we can represent the data instances as multivariate vectors. That is, given a data instance x (e.g., a sequence), we need to find a mapping φ, so that φ(x) is the vector representation of x. Even when the input data is a numeric data matrix, if we wish to discover nonlinear relationships among the attributes, then a nonlinear mapping φ may be used, so that φ(x) represents a vector in the corresponding high-dimensional space comprising nonlinear attributes. We use the term input space to refer to the data space for the input data x and feature space to refer to the space of mapped vectors φ(x). Thus, given a set of data objects or instances xi, and given a mapping function φ, we can transform them into feature vectors φ(xi), which then allows us to analyze complex data instances via numeric analysis methods.