If you've worked on machine learning projects before, you're likely familiar with the general sequence of steps involved in building and deploying a model. While variations exist depending on the specific problem and context, a common machine learning workflow serves as a useful framework. Understanding where feature engineering fits into this process is essential for appreciating its significance.
Let's quickly review the typical stages:
- Problem Definition & Data Collection: Clearly defining the problem you want to solve (e.g., classification, regression) and gathering the relevant raw data. This data might come from databases, APIs, logs, sensors, or various other sources.
- Data Exploration & Preparation: This is where the initial heavy lifting with data occurs. It involves exploring the data to understand its structure, distributions, and potential issues. Crucially, this stage encompasses Feature Engineering, which includes:
- Data Cleaning: Handling missing values, correcting errors, and addressing outliers.
- Feature Transformation: Scaling numerical features, applying mathematical transformations (like log or Box-Cox), and encoding categorical variables.
- Feature Creation: Generating new features from existing ones (e.g., interaction terms, polynomial features, extracting information from dates).
- Feature Selection: Identifying and selecting the most relevant features for the model, potentially removing redundant or irrelevant ones.
- Model Selection & Training: Choosing an appropriate machine learning algorithm (e.g., Linear Regression, Random Forest, Neural Network) based on the problem and the prepared data. The model is then trained on the processed features and corresponding target labels (in supervised learning).
- Model Evaluation: Assessing the trained model's performance using appropriate metrics (e.g., accuracy, precision, recall, RMSE) on a separate test dataset that the model hasn't seen during training. This step helps determine how well the model generalizes to new, unseen data.
"5. Model Deployment & Monitoring: Making the trained model available for making predictions on new data. This often involves integrating it into an application or system. Continuous monitoring is needed to ensure the model's performance doesn't degrade over time."
The following diagram illustrates this workflow, highlighting the central role of data preparation and feature engineering:
A typical machine learning workflow, showing Feature Engineering as an important part of the Data Preparation stage, feeding into Model Selection and Training. Note the iterative loops indicating refinement based on evaluation results.
It's important to recognize that this workflow isn't strictly linear. The results from the Model Evaluation stage often lead you back to earlier steps. Poor model performance might indicate that:
- More or different data is needed (Step 1).
- The features were not processed appropriately, requiring adjustments in feature scaling, encoding, or transformation (Step 2b).
- New features need to be created, or different features selected (Step 2b).
- The chosen model or its hyperparameters need tuning (Step 3/4).
Feature engineering, therefore, sits at a critical junction. The choices made here directly dictate the quality of the input fed into the learning algorithm. As the chapter introduction highlighted, raw data is seldom optimal. Numerical data might span significantly different scales, categorical data needs a numerical representation, and valuable information might be hidden within combinations or transformations of existing variables. This course focuses specifically on the techniques used within step 2b, equipping you to effectively prepare your data for successful machine learning applications.
