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, you saw how to find the optimal hyperparameters of some of the most popular machine learning algorithms in order to get better predictive performance (that is, more accurate predictions).

Machine learning algorithms are always referred to as black box where we can only see the inputs and outputs and the implementation inside the algorithm is quite opaque, so people don't know what is happening inside.

With each day that passes, we can sense the elevated need for more transparency in machine learning models. In the last few years, we have seen some cases where algorithms have been accused of discriminating against groups of people. For instance, a few years ago, a not-for-profit news organization called ProPublica highlighted bias in the COMPAS algorithm, built by the Northpointe company. The objective of the algorithm is to assess the likelihood of re-offending for a criminal. It was shown that the algorithm was predicting a higher...