Python Feature Engineering Cookbook

How it works...

We sorted the values of a variable into user-defined intervals using the Boston House Prices dataset. We first plotted a histogram of the LSTAT variable, to get an idea of the range of values of the variable. Next, we arbitrarily determined and captured the limits of the intervals in a list: we created intervals that vary from 0-10, 10-20, 20-30, and more than 30, by setting the upper limit to infinite with np.Inf. Next, we created a list with the interval names as strings.

Using pandas' cut() method and passing the list with the interval limits, we sorted the variable values into the pre-defined bins. We executed the command twice; in the first run, we set the labels argument to the list that contained the label names as ...