Introduction

The previous chapter was all about improving our machine learning model, and interpreting its results and parameters to provide meaningful insights to the business. This chapter opens the third part of this book: enhancing your dataset. In the next three chapters, we are taking a step back and will be focusing on the key input of any machine learning model: the dataset. We will learn how to explore a new dataset, prepare it for the modeling stage, and create new variables (also called feature engineering). These are very exciting and important topics to learn about, so let's jump in.

When we mention data science, most people think about building fancy machine learning algorithms for predicting future outcomes. They usually do not think about all the other critical tasks involved in a data science project. In reality, the modeling step covers only a small part of such a project. You may have already heard about the rule of thumb stating that data scientists spend...