The process of transforming the data to fall within a smaller or common range such as 0 to 1 is called Normalization or Standardization. Normalizing the data attempts to give all attributes an equal weight.
Data normalization methods
Min-max normalization
Min-max normalization performs a linear transformation on the original data. Min-max normalization maps a value of an attribute to new value range by computing,
where
minA - minimum value of an attribute
maxA - maximum value of an attribute
Min-max normalization preserves the relationships among the original data values.
z-score (zero-mean) normalization
The values for an attribute are normalized based on the mean and standard deviation of the attribute.
A variation of z-score normalization replaces the standard deviation of above equation by the mean absolute deviation of the attribute.
The mean absolute deviation sA, is
The z-score normalization using the mean absolute deviation is
Decimal scaling
This method normalizes by moving the decimal point of values of an attribute. The number of decimal points moved depends on the maximum absolute value of the attribute.
where
j is the smallest integer such that