The data are consolidated to make the mining process more efficient and to understand the patterns found easier.
Data transformation strategies
Smoothing - Removing noise from the data using techniques such as binning, regression, clustering.
Attribute construction - Constructing new attributes using given set of attributes to improve the process
Aggregation - summary or aggregation operations are applied to the data.
Normalization - Scaling down the attribute data to fall within a smaller range such as 0 to 1.
Discretization - Replacing values of numeric attributes to interval or conceptual labels.
Concept hierarchy generation - Generalizing the attributes to higher level concept labels.