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)

Technical requirements

In this chapter, we will use pandas, matplotlib, and the open source Python library Featuretools. You can install Featuretools with pip:

pip install featuretools

Otherwise, you can do so with conda:

conda install -c conda-forge featuretools

Make sure you have Featuretools version 1.14.0 or greater to run this notebook. The code was tested using versions 1.14.0 and 1.15.0.

Note

We will work with the Online Retail II dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository: https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Online+Retail+II. Dua, D. and Graff, C. (2019). UCI Machine Learning Repository (http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml). Irvine, CA: The University of California, School of Information and Computer Science.

To download the Online Retail II dataset, follow these steps:

  1. Go to https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases/00502/.
  2. Click on online_retail_II.xlsx to download the data.
  3. Save online_retail_II.xlsx to the folder...