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

Analyzing Your Dataset

Previously, we learned about the overall structure of a dataset and the kind of information it contains. Now, it is time to really dig into it and look at the values of each column.

First, we need to import the pandas package:

import pandas as pd

Then, we'll load the data into a pandas DataFrame:

file_url = 'https://github.com/PacktWorkshops/'\
           'The-Data-Science-Workshop/blob/'\
           'master/Chapter10/dataset/'\
           'Online%20Retail.xlsx?raw=true'
df = pd.read_excel(file_url)

The pandas package provides several methods so that you can display a snapshot of your dataset. The most popular ones are head(), tail(), and sample().

The head() method will show the top rows of your dataset. By default, pandas will display...