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)

Removing observations with missing data

Complete Case Analysis (CCA), also called list-wise deletion of cases, consists of discarding those observations where the values in any of the variables are missing. CCA can be applied to categorical and numerical variables. CCA is quick and easy to implement and has the advantage that it preserves the distribution of the variables, provided the data is missing at random and only a small proportion of the data is missing. However, if data is missing across many variables, CCA may lead to the removal of a big portion of the dataset.

How to do it...

Let's begin by loading pandas and the dataset:

  1. First, we'll import the pandas library:
import pandas...