Python Feature Engineering Cookbook: Over 70 recipes for creating, engineering, and transforming features to build machine learning models

Soledad Galli

Jan 2020 · Packt Publishing Ltd

About this ebook

Extract accurate information from data to train and improve machine learning models using NumPy, SciPy, pandas, and scikit-learn librariesKey Features

• Discover solutions for feature generation, feature extraction, and feature selection
• Uncover the end-to-end feature engineering process across continuous, discrete, and unstructured datasets
• Implement modern feature extraction techniques using Python's pandas, scikit-learn, SciPy and NumPy libraries

Book DescriptionFeature 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 learn

• Simplify your feature engineering pipelines with powerful Python packages
• Get to grips with imputing missing values
• Encode categorical variables with a wide set of techniques
• Extract insights from text quickly and effortlessly
• Develop features from transactional data and time series data
• Derive new features by combining existing variables
• Understand how to transform, discretize, and scale your variables
• Create informative variables from date and time

Who 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.

About the author

Soledad Galli is a bestselling data science instructor, author, and open-source Python developer. As the leading instructor at Train in Data, she teaches intermediate and advanced courses in machine learning that have enrolled over 64,000 students worldwide and continue to receive positive reviews. Sole is also the developer and maintainer of the Python open-source library Feature-engine, which provides an extensive array of methods for feature engineering and selection. With extensive experience as a data scientist in finance and insurance sectors, Sole has developed and deployed machine learning models for assessing insurance claims, evaluating credit risk, and preventing fraud. She is a frequent speaker at podcasts, meetups, and webinars, sharing her expertise with the broader data science community.