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

In the previous chapter, you saw how critical it was to get a very good understanding of your data and learned about different techniques and tools to achieve this goal. While performing Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on a given dataset, you may find some potential issues that need to be addressed before the modeling stage. This is exactly the topic that will be covered in this chapter. You will learn how you can handle some of the most frequent data quality issues and prepare the dataset properly.

This chapter will introduce you to the issues that you will encounter frequently during your data scientist career (such as duplicated rows, incorrect data types, incorrect values, and missing values) and you will learn about the techniques you can use to easily fix them. But be careful – some issues that you come across don't necessarily need to be fixed. Some of the suspicious or unexpected values you find may be genuine from a business point of view. This...