Data preprocessing involves cleaning, transforming, and reducing raw data to prepare it for analysis. It addresses issues like missing values, inconsistencies, noise and redundancy. Key tasks include data cleaning to detect and correct errors, data integration to combine related data from multiple sources, and data reduction to reduce dimensionality or data size for more efficient analysis while retaining important information. Techniques like wavelet transforms, principal component analysis and dimensionality reduction are commonly used for data reduction. Preprocessing aims to improve data quality and prepare it for downstream analysis tasks.