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Book Overview & Buying
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Table Of Contents
Python Data Analysis - Fourth Edition
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We have addressed the missing data and outliers as part of cleaning the messy dataset, but clean data does not necessarily mean the data is informative for analysis. To improve data usability, feature engineering enhances the dataset by showing previously invisible patterns and making the present features more valuable.
The first feature engineering technique we will discuss is the Categorical Encoding technique. As we work with data and data manipulation libraries such as Pandas, you will realize that not all data points are numbers; instead, they are represented as categories. Features such as Country or Preferred Device are prime examples of categorical features.
The problem with categorical data is that many machine learning algorithms expect numerical input instead of categories. Therefore, categorical encoding becomes an important step as it converts the categorical variables into a numerical format.
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