Book Image

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Soledad Galli
Book Image

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Soledad Galli

Overview of this book

Feature engineering, the process of transforming variables and creating features, albeit time-consuming, ensures that your machine learning models perform seamlessly. This second edition of Python Feature Engineering Cookbook will take the struggle out of feature engineering by showing you how to use open source Python libraries to accelerate the process via a plethora of practical, hands-on recipes. This updated edition begins by addressing fundamental data challenges such as missing data and categorical values, before moving on to strategies for dealing with skewed distributions and outliers. The concluding chapters show you how to develop new features from various types of data, including text, time series, and relational databases. With the help of numerous open source Python libraries, you'll learn how to implement each feature engineering method in a performant, reproducible, and elegant manner. By the end of this Python book, you will have the tools and expertise needed to confidently build end-to-end and reproducible feature engineering pipelines that can be deployed into production.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Finding extreme values for imputation

Replacing missing values with a value at the end of the variable distribution (extreme values) is equivalent to replacing them with an arbitrary value, but instead of identifying the arbitrary values manually, these values are automatically selected as those at the very end of the variable distribution. Missing data can be replaced with a value that is greater or smaller than the remaining values in the variable. To select a value that is greater, we can use the mean plus a factor of the standard deviation, or the 75th quantile + (IQR * 1.5), where IQR is the IQR given by the 75th quantile - the 25th quantile. To replace missing data with values that are smaller than the remaining values, we can use the mean minus a factor of the standard deviation, or the 25th quantile – (IQR * 1.5).

Note

End-of-tail imputation may distort the distribution of the original variables, so it may not be suitable for linear models.

In this recipe, we...