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

Exploring Your Data

If you are running your project by following the CRISP-DM methodology, the first step will be to discuss the project with the stakeholders and clearly define their requirements and expectations. Only once this is clear can you start having a look at the data and see whether you will be able to achieve these objectives.

After receiving a dataset, you may want to make sure that the dataset contains the information you need for your project. For instance, if you are working on a supervised project, you will check whether this dataset contains the target variable you need and whether there are any missing or incorrect values for this field. You may also check how many observations (rows) and variables (columns) there are. These are the kind of questions you will have initially with a new dataset. This section will introduce you to some techniques you can use to get the answers to these questions.

For the rest of this section, we will be working with a dataset...