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

Summary

You just learned a lot regarding how to analyze a dataset. This a very critical step in any data science project. Getting a deep understanding of the dataset will help you to better assess the feasibility of achieving the requirements from the business.

Getting the right data in the right format at the right level of quality is key for getting good predictive performance for any machine learning algorithm. This is why it is so important to take the time analyzing the data before proceeding to the next stage. This task is referred to as the data understanding phase in the CRISP-DM methodology and can also be called Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA).

You learned how to use descriptive statistics to summarize key attributes of the dataset such as the average value of a numerical column, its spread with standard deviation or its range (minimum and maximum values), the unique values of a categorical variable, and its most frequent values. You also saw how to use data visualization...