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)

Performing zero-coding – capping the variable at zero

In econometrics and statistics, top-coding and bottom-coding refer to the act of censoring data points, the values of which are above or below a certain number or threshold, respectively. In essence, top and bottom coding is what we have covered in the previous recipe, where we capped the minimum or maximum values of variables at a certain value, which we determined with the mean and standard deviation, the inter-quartile range proximity rule, or the percentiles. Zero-coding is a variant of bottom-coding and refers to the process of capping, usually the lower value of the variable, at zero. It is commonly used for variables that cannot take negative values, such as age or income. In this recipe, we will learn how to implement zero-coding in a toy dataframe using pandas and Feature-engine.

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