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)

Extracting features from text

In Chapter 11, Extracting Features from Text Variables, we will discuss various features that we can extract from pieces of text utilizing pandas and scikit-learn. We can also extract multiple features from text automatically by utilizing Featuretools.

Featuretools supports the creation of two basic features from text as part of its default functionality, which are the number of characters and the number of words in a piece of text. In addition, there is an accompanying Python library, Natural Language Processing (NLP) primitives, which contains a lot more functionality to create more advanced features for use with text. Among these functions, we find primitives for counting the number of stop words and punctuation and calculating the amount of whitespace and uppercase, as well as more complex functions for deriving the diversity score or the polarity score.

Note

For a complete list of the functions available, visit https://featuretools.alteryx...