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)

Working with time in different time zones

Some organizations operate internationally; therefore, the information they collect about events may be recorded alongside the time zone of the area where the event took place. To be able to compare events that occurred across different time zones, we need to set all of the variables within the same zone. In this recipe, we will learn how to unify the time zones of a datetime variable and then learn how to reassign a variable to a different time zone using pandas.

How to do it...

To proceed with this recipe, we must import pandas and then create a toy DataFrame with two variables, each one containing a date and time in different time zones:

  1. Import pandas:
    import pandas as pd
  2. Let’s create a toy DataFrame with one variable with values in different time zones:
    df = pd.DataFrame()
    df['time1'] = pd.concat([
        pd.Series(
            pd.date_range(
      ...