Data pre-processing is important for ensuring quality data for mining. It involves cleaning dirty data by handling incomplete, noisy, and inconsistent data through techniques like data integration, transformation, reduction, and discretization. The document outlines reasons for dirty data and discusses key tasks in data cleaning like handling missing values, identifying outliers, resolving inconsistencies, and reducing redundancy during integration from multiple sources. Data quality is measured along dimensions of accuracy, completeness, consistency, and others.