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Visualising Outliers in Nominal Data

  • Conference paper
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The 8th International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Complexity ((SPCOM))

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Abstract

Scatter plot is a useful method for visualising clusters and outliers in continuous data. However, this method cannot be used directly on nominal data due to a lack of natural ordering and ‘distance’ in nominal values. One solution to this problem is to map the multi-dimensional nominal data to a numeric space, and then draw a scatter plot of the data points based on the first two principal components of the numeric space. This paper reports a study on how such plots can be generated using three types of mapping: (a) Binary Input Mapping (BImap), (b) Attribute Value Frequency Mapping (AVFmap), and (c) BImap combined with AVFmap. Results show that the combined method draws upon the complementary strengths of BImap and AVFmap, to generate meaningful scatter plots for visualising categorical outliers and achieve the highest information gain among the methods tested.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, SIM University, 535A Clementi Road, Singapore, Singapore

    Swee Chuan Tan

Authors
  1. Swee Chuan Tan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Swee Chuan Tan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford, United Kingdom

    Lorna Uden

  2. College of Management, National University of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Taiwan

    Leon S.L. Wang

  3. and Control Faculty of Science, Universidad Salamanca Department of Computing Science, Salamanca, Spain

    Juan Manuel Corchado Rodríguez

  4. National University of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung, Taiwan

    Hsin-Chang Yang

  5. Department of Information Management, National University of Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Taiwan

    I-Hsien Ting

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Tan, S.C. (2014). Visualising Outliers in Nominal Data. In: Uden, L., Wang, L., Corchado Rodríguez, J., Yang, HC., Ting, IH. (eds) The 8th International Conference on Knowledge Management in Organizations. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7287-8_28

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7287-8_28

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-007-7286-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-007-7287-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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