Book Image

Data Cleaning and Exploration with Machine Learning

By : Michael Walker
Book Image

Data Cleaning and Exploration with Machine Learning

By: Michael Walker

Overview of this book

Many individuals who know how to run machine learning algorithms do not have a good sense of the statistical assumptions they make and how to match the properties of the data to the algorithm for the best results. As you start with this book, models are carefully chosen to help you grasp the underlying data, including in-feature importance and correlation, and the distribution of features and targets. The first two parts of the book introduce you to techniques for preparing data for ML algorithms, without being bashful about using some ML techniques for data cleaning, including anomaly detection and feature selection. The book then helps you apply that knowledge to a wide variety of ML tasks. You’ll gain an understanding of popular supervised and unsupervised algorithms, how to prepare data for them, and how to evaluate them. Next, you’ll build models and understand the relationships in your data, as well as perform cleaning and exploration tasks with that data. You’ll make quick progress in studying the distribution of variables, identifying anomalies, and examining bivariate relationships, as you focus more on the accuracy of predictions in this book. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to deal with complex data problems using unsupervised ML algorithms like principal component analysis and k-means clustering.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Data Cleaning and Machine Learning Algorithms
5
Section 2 – Preprocessing, Feature Selection, and Sampling
9
Section 3 – Modeling Continuous Targets with Supervised Learning
13
Section 4 – Modeling Dichotomous and Multiclass Targets with Supervised Learning
19
Section 5 – Clustering and Dimensionality Reduction with Unsupervised Learning

Using Boruta for feature selection

The Boruta package takes a unique approach to feature selection, though it has some similarities with wrapper methods. For each feature, Boruta creates a shadow feature, one with the same range of values as the original feature but with shuffled values. It then evaluates whether the original feature offers more information than the shadow feature, gradually removing features providing the least information. Boruta outputs confirmed, tentative, and rejected features with each iteration.

Let's use the Boruta package to select features for a classification model of bachelor's degree completion (you can install the Boruta package with pip if you have not yet installed it):

  1. We start by loading the necessary libraries:
    import pandas as pd
    from feature_engine.encoding import OneHotEncoder
    from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
    from sklearn.preprocessing import StandardScaler
    from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier...