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Practical experience of data mining has revealed that preparing data is the most time-consuming phase of any data mining project. Estimates of the amount of time and resources spent on data preparation vary from at least 60% to upward of 80% (SPSS, 2002a). In spite of this fact, not enough attention is given to this important task, thus perpetuating the idea that the core of the data mining eff...

The data selection and data preparation efforts which led to the TIPSTER and Fifth Message Understandin g Conference (MUC-5) evaluation corpora involved substantial effort, time and resources . The Government commitment to these selection and preparation efforts stems from four TIPSTER Program objectives : (1) to provide trainin g data that would promote the development of information extractio...

The document collection needed to reflect the corpus imagined to be seen by analysts. This meant that a very large collection was needed to test the scaling of the algorithms, including documents from many different domains to test the domain independence of the algorithms. Additionally the documents selected needed to mirror the different types of documents used in the TIPSTER application. Spe...

In many published articles, there is still no mention of quality control processes, which might be an indication of the insufficient importance the researchers attach to undertaking or reporting such processes. However, quality control of data is one of the most important steps in research projects. Lack of sufficient attention to quality control of data might have a detrimental effect on the r...