Practical Machine Learning with R

Chapter 3

Feature Engineering

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Interpret date, time series, domain-specific, and datatype-specific data in R.
• Perform numeric and string operations in R.
• Handle categorical variables.
• Generate automated text features in R.
• Identify and add features to an R data frame.
• Implement selection using the correlation analysis, PCA, and RFE approaches.

In this chapter, we will be handling, selecting, and normalizing features required for building a model.

Introduction

We learned about the process of machine learning in Chapter 1, An Introduction to Machine Learning, and looked at the different ways to process data in Chapter 2, Data Cleaning and Pre-processing. In this chapter, ...