Artificial Intelligence with Python - Second Edition

4

Feature Selection and Feature Engineering

Feature selection – also known as variable selection, attribute selection, or variable subset selection – is a method used to select a subset of features (variables, dimensions) from an initial dataset. Feature selection is a key step in the process of building machine learning models and can have a huge impact on the performance of a model. Using correct and relevant features as the input to your model can also reduce the chance of overfitting, because having more relevant features reduces the opportunity of a model to use noisy features that don't add signal as input. Lastly, having less input features decreases the amount of time that it will take to train a model. Learning which features to ...