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

In this chapter, you learned how important it is to prepare any given dataset and fix the main quality issues it has. This is critical because the cleaner a dataset is, the easier it will be for any machine learning model to easily learn about the relevant patterns. On top of this, most algorithms can't handle issues such as missing values, so they must be handled prior to the modeling phase. In this chapter, you covered the most frequent issues that are faced in data science projects: duplicate rows, incorrect data types, unexpected values, and missing values.

The goal of this chapter was to introduce you to the concepts that will help you to spot some of these issues and easily fix them so that you have the basic toolkit to be able to handle other cases. As a final note, throughout this chapter, we emphasized how important it is to discuss the issues you find with the business or the data engineering team you are working with. For instance, if you've detected...