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

Achieving better performance in feature engineering


Throughout this book, we have relied on a base definition of better when it came to the various feature engineering methods we put into place. Our implicit goal was to achieve better predictive performance measured purely on simple metrics such as accuracy for classification tasks and RMSE for regression tasks (mostly accuracy). There are other metrics we may measure and track to gauge predictive performance. For example, we will use the following metrics for classification:

  • True and false positive rate
  • Sensitivity (AKA true positive rate) and specificity
  • False negative and false positive rate

and for regression, the metrics that will be applied are:

  • Mean absolute error
  • R2

These lists go on, and while we will not be abandoning the idea of quantifying performance through metrics such as the ones precedingly listed, we may also measure other meta metrics, or metrics that do not directly correlate to the performance of the prediction of the model...