You're reading from Practical Data Science with Python Learn tools and techniques from hands-on examples to extract insights from data

Product type Paperback

Published in Sep 2021

Publisher Packt

ISBN-13 9781801071970

Length 620 pages

Edition 1st Edition

Languages

Python

Tools

Excel

Concepts

Data Science

Author (1):

Nathan George

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Table of Contents (30) Chapters

Preface

1. Part I - An Introduction and the Basics

2. Introduction to Data Science FREE CHAPTER

3. Getting Started with Python

4. Part II - Dealing with Data

5. SQL and Built-in File Handling Modules in Python

6. Loading and Wrangling Data with Pandas and NumPy

7. Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization

8. Data Wrangling Documents and Spreadsheets

9. Web Scraping

10. Part III - Statistics for Data Science

11. Probability, Distributions, and Sampling

12. Statistical Testing for Data Science

13. Part IV - Machine Learning

14. Preparing Data for Machine Learning: Feature Selection, Feature Engineering, and Dimensionality Reduction

15. Machine Learning for Classification

16. Evaluating Machine Learning Classification Models and Sampling for Classification

17. Machine Learning with Regression

18. Optimizing Models and Using AutoML

19. Tree-Based Machine Learning Models

20. Support Vector Machine (SVM) Machine Learning Models

21. Part V - Text Analysis and Reporting

22. Clustering with Machine Learning

23. Working with Text

24. Part VI - Wrapping Up

25. Data Storytelling and Automated Reporting/Dashboarding

26. Ethics and Privacy

27. Staying Up to Date and the Future of Data Science

28. Other Books You May Enjoy

29. Index

Feature selection

When we are using features to predict a target, some of the features will be more important than others. For example, if we are predicting whether someone will default on a loan, their credit score will be a much better predictor of default than their height and weight. While we can use a large number of features as inputs to ML models, it's much better to minimize the number of features we're using with feature selection methods. ML algorithms take computational power and time to run, and the simpler and more effective we can make the input features, the better. With feature selection, we can screen our inputs for those that have the most promise. These features should have some relationship to the target variable so that we can predict the target with the features. Then we can throw out variables that aren't going to help predict the target.