Book Image

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook

By : Soledad Galli
Book Image

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook

By: Soledad Galli

Overview of this book

Feature engineering is invaluable for developing and enriching your machine learning models. In this cookbook, you will work with the best tools to streamline your feature engineering pipelines and techniques and simplify and improve the quality of your code. Using Python libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, Featuretools, and Feature-engine, you’ll learn how to work with both continuous and discrete datasets and be able to transform features from unstructured datasets. You will develop the skills necessary to select the best features as well as the most suitable extraction techniques. This book will cover Python recipes that will help you automate feature engineering to simplify complex processes. You’ll also get to grips with different feature engineering strategies, such as the box-cox transform, power transform, and log transform across machine learning, reinforcement learning, and natural language processing (NLP) domains. By the end of this book, you’ll have discovered tips and practical solutions to all of your feature engineering problems.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Aggregating transactions in a time window

When we want to predict an event at a certain point in time, often, transactions or values closer to the event tend to be more relevant. Then, if we want to predict whether a customer will churn next week, the information in the last weeks or months tends to be more informative than the transactions of the customer in the past 5 years.

We can use mathematical operations to summarize historical data, just like we did in the previous recipe, but only for a certain temporal window. This way, we can create features such as the maximum amount spent in the last week or the number of transactions in the last month, to name a few examples. In this recipe, we will summarize time series data over discrete time windows using pandas.

Getting ready

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