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 on balancing datasets, we dealt with the Bank Marketing dataset, which had 18 variables. We were able to load that dataset very easily, fit a model, and get results. But have you considered the scenario when the number of variables you have to deal with is large, say around 18 million instead of the 18 you dealt with in the last chapter? How do you load such large datasets and analyze them? How do you deal with the computing resources required for modeling with such large datasets?

This is the reality in some modern-day datasets in domains such as:

  • Healthcare, where genetics datasets can have millions of features
  • High-resolution imaging datasets
  • Web data related to advertisements, ranking, and crawling

When dealing with such huge datasets, many challenges can arise:

  • Storage and computation challenges: Large datasets with high dimensions require a lot of storage and expensive computational resources for analysis...