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

Feature Engineering

In the previous section, we traversed the process of EDA. As part of the earlier process, we tested our business hypotheses by slicing and dicing the data and through visualizations. You might be wondering where we will use the intuitions that we derived from all of the analysis we did. The answer to that question will be addressed in this section.

Feature engineering is the process of transforming raw variables to create new variables and this will be covered later in the chapter. Feature engineering is one of the most important steps that influence the accuracy of the models that we build.

There are two broad types of feature engineering:

  1. Here, we transform raw variables based on intuitions from a business perspective. These intuitions are what we build during the exploratory analysis.
  2. The transformation of raw variables is done from a statistical and data normalization perspective.

We will look into each type of feature engineering...