Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8bljj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-01T23:44:14.621Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Features, Reduced: Feature Selection, Dimensionality Reduction and Embeddings

from Part One - Fundamentals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2020

Pablo Duboue
Affiliation:
Textualization Software Ltd.
Get access

Summary

This chapter presents a staple of Feature Engineering: the automatic reduction of features, either by direction selection or by projection to a smaller feature space.Central to Feature Engineering are efforts to reduce the number of features, as uninformative features bloat the ML model with unnecessary parameters. In turn, too many parameters then either produces suboptimal results, as they are easy to overfit, or require large amounts of training data. These efforts are either by explicitly dropping certain features (feature selection) or mapping the feature vector, if it is sparse, into a lower, denser dimension (dimensionality reduction). There are also cover some algorithms that perform feature selection as part of their inner computation (embedded feature selection or regularization). Feature selection takes the spotlight within Feature Engineering due to its intrinsic utility for Error Analysis. Some techniques such as feature ablation using wrapper methods are used as the starting step before a feature drill down. Moreover, as feature selection helps build understandable models, it intertwines with Error Analysis as the analysis profits from such understandable models.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Art of Feature Engineering
Essentials for Machine Learning
, pp. 79 - 111
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×