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)

Replacing categories with ordinal numbers

Ordinal encoding consists of replacing the categories with digits from 1 to k (or 0 to k-1, depending on the implementation), where k is the number of distinct categories of the variable. The numbers are assigned arbitrarily. Ordinal encoding is better suited for non-linear machine learning models, which can navigate through the arbitrarily assigned digits to try and find patterns that relate to the target.

In this recipe, we will perform ordinal encoding using pandas, scikit-learn, and Feature-engine.

How to do it...

Let's first import the necessary Python libraries and prepare the dataset:

  1. Import pandas and the required function and classes:
import pandas as pd
from sklearn...