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)

Sorting the variable values in intervals of equal frequency

Equal-frequency discretization divides the values of the variable into intervals that carry the same proportion of observations. The interval width is determined by quantiles, and therefore different intervals may have different widths. In summary, equal-frequency discretization using quantiles consists of dividing the continuous variable into N quantiles, with N to be defined by the user. This discretization technique is particularly useful for skewed variables as it spreads the observations over the different bins equally. In this recipe, we will perform equal-frequency discretization using pandas, scikit-learn, and Feature-engine.

How to do it...

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