Python Feature Engineering Cookbook

Python Feature Engineering Cookbook, Second Edition will give you the practice, tools, and techniques to streamline your feature engineering pipelines and simplify and improve the quality of your code. With more than 70 methods to transform or create variables, you will find solutions tailored to different datasets and machine learning models.

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Create end-to-end, reproducible feature engineering pipelines that can be deployed into production using open-source Python libraries

Key Features

Learn and implement feature engineering best practices
Reinforce your learning with the help of multiple hands-on recipes
Build end-to-end feature engineering pipelines that are performant and reproducible

Book DescriptionFeature engineering, the process of transforming variables and creating features, albeit time-consuming, ensures that your machine learning models perform seamlessly. This second edition of Python Feature Engineering Cookbook will take the struggle out of feature engineering by showing you how to use open source Python libraries to accelerate the process via a plethora of practical, hands-on recipes.

This updated edition begins by addressing fundamental data challenges such as missing data and categorical values, before moving on to strategies for dealing with skewed distributions and outliers. The concluding chapters show you how to develop new features from various types of data, including text, time series, and relational databases. With the help of numerous open source Python libraries, you'll learn how to implement each feature engineering method in a performant, reproducible, and elegant manner.

By the end of this Python book, you will have the tools and expertise needed to confidently build end-to-end and reproducible feature engineering pipelines that can be deployed into production.

What you will learn

Impute missing data using various univariate and multivariate methods
Encode categorical variables with one-hot, ordinal, and count encoding
Handle highly cardinal categorical variables
Transform, discretize, and scale your variables
Create variables from date and time with pandas and Feature-engine
Combine variables into new features
Extract features from text as well as from transactional data with Featuretools
Create features from time series data with tsfresh

Who this book is forThis book is for machine learning and data science students and professionals, as well as software engineers working on machine learning model deployment, who want to learn more about how to transform their data and create new features to train machine learning models in a better way.