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Discretization

• Three types of attributes
• Nominal—values from an unordered set, e.g., color, profession
• Ordinal—values from an ordered set, e.g., military or academic rank
• Numeric—real numbers, e.g., integer or real numbers
• Discretization: Divide the range of a continuous attribute into intervals
• Interval labels can then be used to replace actual data values
• Reduce data size by discretization
• Supervised vs. unsupervised
• Split (top-down) vs. merge (bottom-up)
• Discretization can be performed recursively on an attribute
• Prepare for further analysis, e.g., classification