Book Image

Feature Engineering Made Easy

By : Sinan Ozdemir, Divya Susarla
Book Image

Feature Engineering Made Easy

By: Sinan Ozdemir, Divya Susarla

Overview of this book

Feature engineering is the most important step in creating powerful machine learning systems. This book will take you through the entire feature-engineering journey to make your machine learning much more systematic and effective. You will start with understanding your data—often the success of your ML models depends on how you leverage different feature types, such as continuous, categorical, and more, You will learn when to include a feature, when to omit it, and why, all by understanding error analysis and the acceptability of your models. You will learn to convert a problem statement into useful new features. You will learn to deliver features driven by business needs as well as mathematical insights. You'll also learn how to use machine learning on your machines, automatically learning amazing features for your data. By the end of the book, you will become proficient in Feature Selection, Feature Learning, and Feature Optimization.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface

The structure, or lack thereof, of data


When given a new dataset, it is first important to recognize whether or not your data is structured or unstructured:

  • Structured (organized) data: Data that can be broken down into observations and characteristics. They are generally organized using a tabular method (where rows are observations and columns are characteristics).

  • Unstructured (unorganized) data: Data that exists as a free-flowing entity and does not follow standard organizational hierarchy such as tabularity. Often, unstructured data appears to us as a blob of data, or as a single characteristic (column).

A few examples that highlight the difference between structured and unstructured data are as follows:

  • Data that exists in a raw free-text form, including server logs and tweets, are unstructured

  • Meteorological data, as reported by scientific instruments in precise movements, would be considered highly structured as they exist in a tabular row/column structure