I am learning how to do data mining and I am using this data set from UCI's website.
http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Forest+Fires
The problem I am encountering is how to deal with the area class. My understanding from the description is that I need to apply ln(x+1) to area using AddExpression.
Am I going in the correct direction with this? Or are there other filters I should investigate? Thank you.
I try to answer your question based on the little information you provide. And I haven't worked with the forest-fires data set, but by inspection I see that the classifier attribute "area" often has the value 0. Maybe you can't simply filter out these rows with Area = 0. Your dataset might become too small, or whatnot.
I think you are asked to perform regression of some attribute(s) against "log(area)" in order to linearize it. However,when you try to calculate the log of the Area, values such as log(0) are a problem. values between 0 and 1 might also be problematic.
So a common fix is to add 1 to the value of "Area". This introduces a systematic error, but it is small, and it removes all 0-values, and you can still derive useful models from your log(x+1)-transformed dataset.
And yes, in Weka you do this by "Preprocess"/ AddExpression(x+1). This creates a new attribute. Then you might remove the old area attribute.
Of course, in interpreting your model, you should be aware of the transformation. If you just want to find out what the significant independent attributes are in your linear regression model, I'd say the transformation does not matter. The data points are just shifted a little bit.