Data preprocessing is a crucial step in pattern recognition that helps prepare raw data for analysis. Common techniques include data cleaning to handle missing values and outliers, data transformation through normalization, feature engineering, and dimensionality reduction. Other techniques are data encoding to prepare categorical variables, data balancing for imbalanced datasets, and data splitting to evaluate models. Pattern recognition can be applied to various data types including images, text, time series, biometric, sensor, and financial data. The type of data used depends on the specific problem and applications like facial recognition, speech recognition, activity monitoring and market prediction.