Chapter 4. Building Good Training Sets – Data Preprocessing
The quality of the data and the amount of useful information that it contains are key factors that determine how well a machine learning algorithm can learn. Therefore, it is absolutely critical that we make sure to examine and preprocess a dataset before we feed it to a learning algorithm. In this chapter, we will discuss the essential data preprocessing techniques that will help us to build good machine learning models.
The topics that we will cover in this chapter are as follows:
- Removing and imputing missing values from the dataset
- Getting categorical data into shape for machine learning algorithms
- Selecting relevant features for the model construction
Dealing with missing data
It is not uncommon in real-world applications that our samples are missing one or more values for various reasons. There could have been an error in the data collection process, certain measurements are not applicable, particular fields could...
