Book Image

The Data Science Workshop - Second Edition

By : Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare
5 (1)
Book Image

The Data Science Workshop - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Anthony So, Thomas V. Joseph, Robert Thas John, Andrew Worsley, Dr. Samuel Asare

Overview of this book

Where there’s data, there’s insight. With so much data being generated, there is immense scope to extract meaningful information that’ll boost business productivity and profitability. By learning to convert raw data into game-changing insights, you’ll open new career paths and opportunities. The Data Science Workshop begins by introducing different types of projects and showing you how to incorporate machine learning algorithms in them. You’ll learn to select a relevant metric and even assess the performance of your model. To tune the hyperparameters of an algorithm and improve its accuracy, you’ll get hands-on with approaches such as grid search and random search. Next, you’ll learn dimensionality reduction techniques to easily handle many variables at once, before exploring how to use model ensembling techniques and create new features to enhance model performance. In a bid to help you automatically create new features that improve your model, the book demonstrates how to use the automated feature engineering tool. You’ll also understand how to use the orchestration and scheduling workflow to deploy machine learning models in batch. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently. By the end of this book, you’ll have the skills to start working on data science projects confidently.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Preface
12
12. Feature Engineering

Introduction

The previous chapter was all about improving our machine learning model, and interpreting its results and parameters to provide meaningful insights to the business. This chapter opens the third part of this book: enhancing your dataset. In the next three chapters, we are taking a step back and will be focusing on the key input of any machine learning model: the dataset. We will learn how to explore a new dataset, prepare it for the modeling stage, and create new variables (also called feature engineering). These are very exciting and important topics to learn about, so let's jump in.

When we mention data science, most people think about building fancy machine learning algorithms for predicting future outcomes. They usually do not think about all the other critical tasks involved in a data science project. In reality, the modeling step covers only a small part of such a project. You may have already heard about the rule of thumb stating that data scientists spend...