A Data Preparation Methodology in Data Mining Applied to Mortality Population Databases

It is known that the data preparation phase is the most time consuming phase in the data mining process. Between 50% or up to 70% of the total project time and the results of data preparation directly affect the quality of it. Currently, data mining methodologies hold a general purpose; one of the limitations being that they do not provide a guide about what particular task to develop in a particular domain. This paper shows a new data preparation methodology oriented to the epidemiological domain in which we have identified two sets of tasks: General Data Preparation and Specific Data Preparation. For both sets, the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) is adopted as a guideline. The main contribution of our methodology is fourteen specialized tasks concerning such domain. To validate the proposed methodology, we developed a data mining system and the entire process was applied to real mortality databases. The results were encouraging, on one hand, we observed that the use of the methodology reduced some of the time-consuming tasks and, on the other hand, the data mining system showed findings of unknown and potentially useful patterns for the public health services in Mexico.