... a mining tool.” “Information is contained in variability.” Information, information, information. Clearly, “information” is a key feature of data preparation. In fact, information—its discovery, ... that, as a rule of thumb for the minimum amount of data to accept, for mining (as opposed to data preparation) , use at leasttwice the number of instances required for a data preparation representative ... useful information. Also, information theory can be used to examine data as instances, data as variables, the data set as a whole, and various parts of a data set. Entropy and mutual information...