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, we have learned about various techniques for dimensionality reduction. Let's summarize what we have learned in this chapter.

At the beginning of the chapter, we were introduced to the challenges inherent with some of the modern-day datasets in terms of scalability. To further learn about these challenges, we downloaded the Internet Advertisement dataset and did an activity where we witnessed the scalability challenges posed by a large dataset. In the activity, we artificially created a large dataset and fit a logistic regression model to it.

In the subsequent sections, we were introduced to five different methods of dimensionality reduction.

Backward feature elimination worked on the principle of eliminating features one by one until no major degradation of accuracy measures occurred. This method is computationally intensive, but we got better results than the benchmark model.

Forward feature selection goes in the opposite direction as backward...