Feature Engineering For Machine Learning

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

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

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

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.

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

Feature engineering plays a vital role in big data analytics. Machine learning and data mining algorithms cannot work without data. Little can be achieved if there are few features to represent the underlying data objects, and the quality of results of those algorithms largely depends on the quality of the available features. Feature Engineering for Machine Learning and Data Analytics provides a comprehensive introduction to feature engineering, including feature generation, feature extraction, feature transformation, feature selection, and feature analysis and evaluation. The book presents key concepts, methods, examples, and applications, as well as chapters on feature engineering for major data types such as texts, images, sequences, time series, graphs, streaming data, software engineering data, Twitter data, and social media data. It also contains generic feature generation approaches, as well as methods for generating tried-and-tested, hand-crafted, domain-specific features. The first chapter defines the concepts of features and feature engineering, offers an overview of the book, and provides pointers to topics not covered in this book. The next six chapters are devoted to feature engineering, including feature generation for specific data types. The subsequent four chapters cover generic approaches for feature engineering, namely feature selection, feature transformation based feature engineering, deep learning based feature engineering, and pattern based feature generation and engineering. The last three chapters discuss feature engineering for social bot detection, software management, and Twitter-based applications respectively. This book can be used as a reference for data analysts, big data scientists, data preprocessing workers, project managers, project developers, prediction modelers, professors, researchers, graduate students, and upper level undergraduate students. It can also be used as the primary text for courses on feature engineering, or as a supplement for courses on machine learning, data mining, and big data analytics.