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You're reading from  Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python

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Published inApr 2016
Reading LevelBeginner
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ISBN-139781785882951
Edition1st Edition
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David Julian
David Julian
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David Julian

David Julian is a freelance technology consultant and educator. He has worked as a consultant for government, private, and community organizations on a variety of projects, including using machine learning to detect insect outbreaks in controlled agricultural environments (Urban Ecological Systems Ltd., Bluesmart Farms), designing and implementing event management data systems (Sustainable Industry Expo, Lismore City Council), and designing multimedia interactive installations (Adelaide University). He has also written Designing Machine Learning Systems With Python for Packt Publishing and was a technical reviewer for Python Machine Learning and Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition, published by Packt.
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Transforming features


When we transform features, our aim, obviously, is to make them more useful to our models. This can be done by adding, removing, or changing information represented by the feature. A common feature transformation is that of changing the feature type. A typical example is binarization, that is, transforming a categorical feature into a set of binary ones. Another example is changing an ordinal feature into a categorical feature. In both these cases, we lose information. In the first instance, the value of a single categorical feature is mutually exclusive, and this is not conveyed by the binary representation. In the second instance, we lose the ordering information. These types of transformations can be considered inductive because they consist of a well-defined logical procedure that does not involve an objective choice apart from the decision to carry out these transformations in the first place.

Binarization can be easily carried out using the sklearn.preprocessing...

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Designing Machine Learning Systems with Python
Published in: Apr 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781785882951

Author (1)

author image
David Julian

David Julian is a freelance technology consultant and educator. He has worked as a consultant for government, private, and community organizations on a variety of projects, including using machine learning to detect insect outbreaks in controlled agricultural environments (Urban Ecological Systems Ltd., Bluesmart Farms), designing and implementing event management data systems (Sustainable Industry Expo, Lismore City Council), and designing multimedia interactive installations (Adelaide University). He has also written Designing Machine Learning Systems With Python for Packt Publishing and was a technical reviewer for Python Machine Learning and Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition, published by Packt.
Read more about David Julian