Exploring the effect of normalization on medical
data classification
Namrata Singh
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
National Institute of Technology Raipur
Chhattisgarh, India
nsingh.phd2016.cs@nitrr.ac.in
Abstract—Data normalization as one of the pre-processing
strategies is utilized either to transform or scale the data in
order to make an equal contribution of each attribute. For a
given classification problem, the performance of any machine
learning approach depends upon the quality of data in order to
produce a generalized classification approach. Various studies
have shown the significance of data normalization to enhance
the quality of data and finally the performance of machine
learning techniques. But there is dearth of investigations about
the effect of data normalization methods in classifying the
medical datasets. Thus, this study intends to explore the effect
of three data normalization techniques namely min-max, z-score
and Median and Median Absolute Deviation on the
performance of four classification algorithms namely Naïve
Bayes, Support Vector Machine - Radial Basis Function,
Random Forest and k-Nearest Neighbour. The experiments
conducted on 20 publicly available medical datasets are based
on the classification accuracy as performance parameter. The
best performance results were obtained with z-score
normalization method along with Random Forest classifier.
Keywords—Data normalization, Naïve Bayes, Support Vector
Machines, Random Forest, k-Nearest Neighbour, Classification
I. INTRODUCTION
Normalization is a part of data transformation where data
are normalized into appropriate form for mining [1]. It is a
critical step in data preprocessing before modelling any
machine learning (ML) algorithm. Various types of
normalization procedures are used to improve the accuracy of
medical data classification [2]. This procedure aims at
changing the numeric column values in the dataset by using a
common scale, without losing information and distorting
differences in the ranges of values [3].
In medical data classification, the models generate poor
performance due to the non-application of appropriate pre-
processing strategies [4]. These strategies include feature
selection [5], eliminating noise and outliers from the data [6],
instance filtering [7] and transformation of data, i.e.,
normalization. Among these, data normalization is an
operation on raw data that either rescales or transforms it such
that each attribute has a uniform contribution. It handles two
basic problems of data mining that hampers the learning
process of ML approaches, i.e., the outliers and presence of
dominant attributes [8]. Several techniques have been
developed for the normalization of raw data within a specific
range by using statistical procedures [9].
Consider a dataset with attributes and samples
represented as = , , ∈ ∈ , where
demonstrates the data to be modelled by the ML technique and
denotes the respective class label. In this study, three
normalization approaches namely min-max, z-score and
XXX-X-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/$XX.00 ©20XX IEEE
To be published in Proceedings of IEEE conference,
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Vision (AIMV-2021)
Pradeep Singh
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
National Institute of Technology Raipur
Chhattisgarh, India
psingh.cs@nitrr.ac.in
MMAD are utilized to examine their effect on classification
performance of medical datasets. These approaches are
classified depending upon how some statistical characteristics
of raw data can be utilized to normalize it [10].
The significance of normalization in building accurate ML
models has been observed in medical data classification for
various algorithms such as Naïve Bayes ( ), Support Vector
Machines ( ), Random Forest ( ), k-Nearest Neighbours
( − ) [11]. For such techniques, the normalized input
variable space can affect the learning speed to obtain better
mining result. Several authors have confirmed the effect of
normalization to improve the outcome of medical data
classification [11].
This paper is structured as follows. The related work of
this study is covered in Section 2. Section 3 presents the details
of this methodology. Section 4 gives the experimental results
and discussion. Finally, this study is concluded in Section 5.
II. RELATED WORK
In medical data mining systems [12], data normalization
plays an important role in combining the various attributes on
a common scale. Different normalization approaches have
been utilized by researchers for improving the classification
performance of medical application domains. These methods
included min–max normalization, z-score normalization,
decimal scaling, median & median absolute deviation
(MMAD) etc. The selection of the best possible normalization
technique to obtain an optimal classification performance on
a specific medical problem is still an uphill battle.
Pires et al. [13] analyzed the difference between non-
normalized and normalized data and concluded that best
results were obtained with the non-normalized data on
“Heterogeneity Activity Recognition Dataset”. It was
concluded that the utilization of a particular data
normalization method depends on the dataset. Borkin et al.
[14] presented the impact of data normalization on the
performance of XGBoost (Extreme Gradient Boosting)
classification model for Parkinson’s disease dataset. The
results demonstrated that XGBoost performed better with the
raw data as compared to the normalized one obtained using
min-max procedure. Cao et al. [15] presented the Generalized
Logistic (GL) algorithm, an efficient data scaling method for
classification modeling. Experimental results revealed that
algorithms trained using the data scaled by the GL algorithm
outperformed the ones using z-score and min-max algorithms.
In addition, the algorithms trained using the unscaled data
showed poor performances.
Mihaela and Ruxandra [16] analyzed the effect of applying
various normalization approaches on k-NN algorithm for
Pima Indian Diabetes dataset. Both min-max and z-score