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)

Scaling with the median and quantiles

When scaling variables to the median and quantiles, the median value is removed from the observations and the result is divided by the inter-quartile range (IQR). The IQR is the range between the 1st quartile and the 3rd quartile, or, in other words, the range between the 25th quantile and the 75th quantile:

This method is known as robust scaling because it produces more robust estimates for the center and value range of the variable, and is recommended if the data contains outliers. In this recipe, we will implement scaling with the median and IQR by utilizing scikit-learn.

How to do it...

To begin, we will import the required packages, load the dataset, and prepare the...