Instance Selection

The amounts of data become increasingly large in recent years as the capacity of digital data storage worldwide has significantly increased. As the size of data grows, the demand for data reduction increases for effective data mining. Instance selection is one of the effective means to data reduction. This article introduces basic concepts of instance selection, its context, necessity and functionality. It briefly reviews the state-of-the-art methods for instance selection. Selection is a necessity in the world surrounding us. It stems from the sheer fact of limited resources. No exception for data mining. Many factors give rise to data selection: data is not purely collected for data mining or for one particular application; there are missing data, redundant data, and errors during collection and storage; and data can be too overwhelming to handle. Instance selection is one effective approach to data selection. It is a process of choosing a subset of data to achieve the original purpose of a data mining application. The ideal outcome of instance selection is a model independent, minimum sample of data that can accomplish tasks with little or no performance deterioration.