Feature Engineering

Feature engineering is the process of taking a dataset and constructing explanatory variables — features — that can be used to train a machine learning model for a prediction problem. Often, data is spread across multiple tables and must be gathered into a single table with rows containing the observations and features in the columns.

The traditional approach to feature engineering is to build features one at a time using domain knowledge, a tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone process known as manual feature engineering. The code for manual feature engineering is problem-dependent and must be re-written for each new dataset.