Data pre-processing

Data preprocessing is an important step in the data mining process. The phrase 'garbage in, garbage out' is particularly applicable to data mining and machine learning projects. Data-gathering methods are often loosely controlled, resulting in out-of-range values (e.g., Income: −100), impossible data combinations (e.g., Sex: Male, Pregnant: Yes), missing values, etc. Analyzing data that has not been carefully screened for such problems can produce misleading results. Thus, the representation and quality of data is first and foremost before running an analysis. Often, data preprocessing is the most important phase of a machine learning project, especially in computational biology. Data preprocessing is an important step in the data mining process. The phrase 'garbage in, garbage out' is particularly applicable to data mining and machine learning projects. Data-gathering methods are often loosely controlled, resulting in out-of-range values (e.g., Income: −100), impossible data combinations (e.g., Sex: Male, Pregnant: Yes), missing values, etc. Analyzing data that has not been carefully screened for such problems can produce misleading results. Thus, the representation and quality of data is first and foremost before running an analysis. Often, data preprocessing is the most important phase of a machine learning project, especially in computational biology. If there is much irrelevant and redundant information present or noisy and unreliable data, then knowledge discovery during the training phase is more difficult. Data preparation and filtering steps can take considerable amount of processing time. Data preprocessing includes cleaning, Instance selection, normalization, transformation, feature extraction and selection, etc. The product of data preprocessing is the final training set. Data pre-processing may affect the way in which outcomes of the final data processing can be interpreted. This aspect should be carefully considered when interpretation of the results is a key point, such in the multivariate processing of chemical data (chemometrics).