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

Understanding the Business Context

The best way to work using a concept is with an example you can relate to. To understand the business context, let's, for instance, consider the following example.

The marketing head of the bank where you are a data scientist approaches you with a problem they would like to be addressed. The marketing team recently completed a marketing campaign where they have collated a lot of information on existing customers. They require your help to identify which of these customers are likely to buy a term deposit plan. Based on your assessment of the customer base, the marketing team will chalk out strategies for target marketing. The marketing team has provided access to historical data of past campaigns and their outcomes—that is, whether the targeted customers really bought the term deposits or not. Equipped with the historical data, you have set out on the task to identify the customers with the highest propensity (an inclination) to buy...