Feature Engineering Made Easy: Identify unique features from your dataset in order to build powerful machine learning systems

A perfect guide to speed up the predicting power of machine learning algorithms

Key Features

• Design, discover, and create dynamic, efficient features for your machine learning application
• Understand your data in depth and derive astonishing data insights with the help of this guide
• Grasp powerful feature engineering techniques and build machine learning systems

Book Description

Feature engineering is the most important step in creating powerful machine learning systems. This book will take you through the entire feature engineering journey to make machine learning much more systematic and effective.

You will start with understanding your data; often the success of your ML models depends on how you leverage different feature types, such as continuous, categorical, and more. You will learn when to include a feature, when to omit it, and why, all by understanding error analysis and the acceptability of your models. You will also learn to convert a problem statement into useful new features. This book will guide you in delivering features driven by business needs as well as mathematical insights, and you'll see how to use machine learning for your data.

By the end of the book, you will have become proficient in feature selection, feature learning, and feature pptimization.

What you will learn

• Identify and leverage different feature types
• Clean features in data to improve predictive power
• Understand why and how to perform feature selection and model error analysis
• Leverage domain knowledge to construct new features
• Deliver features based on mathematical insights
• Use machine learning algorithms to construct features
• Master feature engineering and optimization
• Harness feature engineering for real-world applications through a structured case study

Who This Book Is For

If you are a data science professional or a machine learning engineer looking to strengthen your predictive analytics model, then this book is a perfect guide for you. Some basic understanding of machine learning concepts and Python scripting would be enough to get started with this book.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Feature Engineering
2. Feature Understanding - What's in My Data?
3. Feature Improvement - Cleaning Datasets
4. Feature Construction
5. Feature Selection
6. Feature Transformation - How to Change Your Perspective
7. Feature Learning - Automatic Construction of Features
8. Putting It All Together

Sinan Ozdemir is a data scientist, startup founder, and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his dog, Charlie; cat, Euclid; and bearded dragon, Fiero. He spent his academic career studying pure mathematics at Johns Hopkins University before transitioning to education. He spent several years conducting lectures on data science at Johns Hopkins University and at the General Assembly before founding his own startup, Legion Analytics, which uses artificial intelligence and data science to power enterprise sales teams.

After completing a Fellowship at the Y Combinator accelerator, Sinan spent most of his time working on his fast-growing company, while creating educational material for data science.

Divya Susarla is an experienced leader in data methods, implementing and applying tactics across a range of industries and fields including investment management, social enterprise consulting, and wine marketing. She trained in data by way of specializing in Economics and Political Science at University of California, Irvine, cultivating a passion for teaching by developing an analytically based, international affairs curriculum for students through the Global Connect program.

Divya is currently focused on natural language processing and generation techniques at Kylie.ai, a startup helping clients automate their customer support conversations. When she is not busy working on building Kylie.ai and writing educational content, she spends her time traveling across the globe and experimenting with new recipes at her home in Berkeley, CA.