Data Preprocessing

Definition - What does Data Preprocessing mean?

Data preprocessing is a data mining technique that involves transforming raw data into an understandable format. Real-world data is often incomplete, inconsistent, and/or lacking in certain behaviors or trends, and is likely to contain many errors. Data preprocessing is a proven method of resolving such issues. Data preprocessing prepares raw data for further processing.

Data preprocessing is used database-driven applications such as customer relationship management and rule-based applications (like neural networks).

Techopedia explains Data Preprocessing

Data goes through a series of steps during preprocessing:

  • Data Cleaning: Data is cleansed through processes such as filling in missing values, smoothing the noisy data, or resolving the inconsistencies in the data.
  • Data Integration: Data with different representations are put together and conflicts within the data are resolved.
  • Data Transformation: Data is normalized, aggregated and generalized.
  • Data Reduction: This step aims to present a reduced representation of the data in a data warehouse.
  • Data Discretization: Involves the reduction of a number of values of a continuous attribute by dividing the range of attribute intervals.

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