Feature Engineering And Selection

The process of developing predictive models includes many stages. Most resources focus on the modeling algorithms but neglect other critical aspects of the modeling process. This book describes techniques for finding the best representations of predictors for modeling and for nding the best subset of predictors for improving model performance. A variety of example data sets are used to illustrate the techniques along with R programs for reproducing the results.

The process of developing predictive models includes many stages. Most resources focus on the modeling algorithms but neglect other critical aspects of the modeling process. This book describes techniques for finding the best representations of predictors for modeling and for nding the best subset of predictors for improving model performance. A variety of example data sets are used to illustrate the techniques along with R programs for reproducing the results.

The process of developing predictive models includes many stages. Most resources focus on the modeling algorithms but neglect other critical aspects of the modeling process. This book describes techniques for finding the best representations of predictors for modeling and for nding the best subset of predictors for improving model performance. A variety of example data sets are used to illustrate the techniques along with R programs for reproducing the results.

Feature engineering is a crucial step in the machine-learning pipeline, yet this topic is rarely examined on its own. With this practical book, you’ll learn techniques for extracting and transforming features—the numeric representations of raw data—into formats for machine-learning models. Each chapter guides you through a single data problem, such as how to represent text or image data. Together, these examples illustrate the main principles of feature engineering. Rather than simply teach these principles, authors Alice Zheng and Amanda Casari focus on practical application with exercises throughout the book. The closing chapter brings everything together by tackling a real-world, structured dataset with several feature-engineering techniques. Python packages including numpy, Pandas, Scikit-learn, and Matplotlib are used in code examples. You’ll examine: Feature engineering for numeric data: filtering, binning, scaling, log transforms, and power transforms Natural text techniques: bag-of-words, n-grams, and phrase detection Frequency-based filtering and feature scaling for eliminating uninformative features Encoding techniques of categorical variables, including feature hashing and bin-counting Model-based feature engineering with principal component analysis The concept of model stacking, using k-means as a featurization technique Image feature extraction with manual and deep-learning techniques

Build strong foundation for entering the world of Machine Learning and data science with the help of this comprehensive guide About This Book Get started in the field of Machine Learning with the help of this solid, concept-rich, yet highly practical guide. Your one-stop solution for everything that matters in mastering the whats and whys of Machine Learning algorithms and their implementation. Get a solid foundation for your entry into Machine Learning by strengthening your roots (algorithms) with this comprehensive guide. Who This Book Is For This book is for IT professionals who want to enter the field of data science and are very new to Machine Learning. Familiarity with languages such as R and Python will be invaluable here. What You Will Learn Acquaint yourself with important elements of Machine Learning Understand the feature selection and feature engineering process Assess performance and error trade-offs for Linear Regression Build a data model and understand how it works by using different types of algorithm Learn to tune the parameters of Support Vector machines Implement clusters to a dataset Explore the concept of Natural Processing Language and Recommendation Systems Create a ML architecture from scratch. In Detail As the amount of data continues to grow at an almost incomprehensible rate, being able to understand and process data is becoming a key differentiator for competitive organizations. Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, spam detection, document search, and trading strategies, to speech recognition. This makes machine learning well-suited to the present-day era of Big Data and Data Science. The main challenge is how to transform data into actionable knowledge. In this book you will learn all the important Machine Learning algorithms that are commonly used in the field of data science. These algorithms can be used for supervised as well as unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, and semi-supervised learning. A few famous algorithms that are covered in this book are Linear regression, Logistic Regression, SVM, Naive Bayes, K-Means, Random Forest, TensorFlow, and Feature engineering. In this book you will also learn how these algorithms work and their practical implementation to resolve your problems. This book will also introduce you to the Natural Processing Language and Recommendation systems, which help you run multiple algorithms simultaneously. On completion of the book you will have mastered selecting Machine Learning algorithms for clustering, classification, or regression based on for your problem. Style and approach An easy-to-follow, step-by-step guide that will help you get to grips with real -world applications of Algorithms for Machine Learning.

A practical guide for data scientists who want to improve the performance of any machine learning solution with feature engineering.

Extract accurate information from data to train and improve machine learning models using NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and scikit-learn libraries Key FeaturesDiscover solutions for feature generation, feature extraction, and feature selectionUncover the end-to-end feature engineering process across continuous, discrete, and unstructured datasetsImplement modern feature extraction techniques using Python's pandas, scikit-learn, SciPy and NumPy librariesBook Description Feature engineering is invaluable for developing and enriching your machine learning models. In this cookbook, you will work with the best tools to streamline your feature engineering pipelines and techniques and simplify and improve the quality of your code. Using Python libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, Featuretools, and Feature-engine, you’ll learn how to work with both continuous and discrete datasets and be able to transform features from unstructured datasets. You will develop the skills necessary to select the best features as well as the most suitable extraction techniques. This book will cover Python recipes that will help you automate feature engineering to simplify complex processes. You’ll also get to grips with different feature engineering strategies, such as the box-cox transform, power transform, and log transform across machine learning, reinforcement learning, and natural language processing (NLP) domains. By the end of this book, you’ll have discovered tips and practical solutions to all of your feature engineering problems. What you will learnSimplify your feature engineering pipelines with powerful Python packagesGet to grips with imputing missing valuesEncode categorical variables with a wide set of techniquesExtract insights from text quickly and effortlesslyDevelop features from transactional data and time series dataDerive new features by combining existing variablesUnderstand how to transform, discretize, and scale your variablesCreate informative variables from date and timeWho this book is for This book is for machine learning professionals, AI engineers, data scientists, and NLP and reinforcement learning engineers who want to optimize and enrich their machine learning models with the best features. Knowledge of machine learning and Python coding will assist you with understanding the concepts covered in this book.

Deliver huge improvements to your machine learning pipelines without spending hours fine-tuning parameters! This book’s practical case-studies reveal feature engineering techniques that upgrade your data wrangling—and your ML results. In Feature Engineering Bookcamp you will learn how to: Identify and implement feature transformations for your data Build powerful machine learning pipelines with unstructured data like text and images Quantify and minimize bias in machine learning pipelines at the data level Use feature stores to build real-time feature engineering pipelines Enhance existing machine learning pipelines by manipulating the input data Use state-of-the-art deep learning models to extract hidden patterns in data Feature Engineering Bookcamp guides you through a collection of projects that give you hands-on practice with core feature engineering techniques. You’ll work with feature engineering practices that speed up the time it takes to process data and deliver real improvements in your model’s performance. This instantly-useful book skips the abstract mathematical theory and minutely-detailed formulas; instead you’ll learn through interesting code-driven case studies, including tweet classification, COVID detection, recidivism prediction, stock price movement detection, and more. About the technology Get better output from machine learning pipelines by improving your training data! Use feature engineering, a machine learning technique for designing relevant input variables based on your existing data, to simplify training and enhance model performance. While fine-tuning hyperparameters or tweaking models may give you a minor performance bump, feature engineering delivers dramatic improvements by transforming your data pipeline. About the book Feature Engineering Bookcamp walks you through six hands-on projects where you’ll learn to upgrade your training data using feature engineering. Each chapter explores a new code-driven case study, taken from real-world industries like finance and healthcare. You’ll practice cleaning and transforming data, mitigating bias, and more. The book is full of performance-enhancing tips for all major ML subdomains—from natural language processing to time-series analysis. What's inside Identify and implement feature transformations Build machine learning pipelines with unstructured data Quantify and minimize bias in ML pipelines Use feature stores to build real-time feature engineering pipelines Enhance existing pipelines by manipulating input data About the reader For experienced machine learning engineers familiar with Python. About the author Sinan Ozdemir is the founder and CTO of Shiba, a former lecturer of Data Science at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of multiple textbooks on data science and machine learning. Table of Contents 1 Introduction to feature engineering 2 The basics of feature engineering 3 Healthcare: Diagnosing COVID-19 4 Bias and fairness: Modeling recidivism 5 Natural language processing: Classifying social media sentiment 6 Computer vision: Object recognition 7 Time series analysis: Day trading with machine learning 8 Feature stores 9 Putting it all together