Feature Engineering Studio

October 7, 2013

Welcome to Bring Me a Rock Day 2

But first…

• Excel Equation Solver

What it requires

• Parameters• Goodness metric (typically SSR)

Linear Regression Example

• Look at prior variables– And how model prediction is created from

predictor• Create SSR variable

Linear Regression Example

• Hand-iterate on variables

Linear Regression Example

• Excel equation solver

BKT Example

• Go through functions

BKT Example

• Excel equation solver

BKT Example

• Excel equation solver– Constrain P(G) to under 0.3

BKT Example

• Excel equation solver– Try different solver algorithms

Questions? Comments?

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Functionality to make it easy to regroup and transform data– Find similar names– Connect names– Bin numerical data– Mathematical transforms showing resultant

graphs– Text transforms and column creation

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Functionality for finding anomalies/outliers

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Functionality for automatically repeating the same process on a new data set

• *Really* nice for cases where you complete a complex process and want to repeat it

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Functionality for connecting your data set to web services to get additional relevant info

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Can load in and export common but hard-to-work-with data types– JSON and XML

GoogleRefine(now OpenRefine)

• Some videos you should watch later

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70J_H_zAWM

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO8NVCs_Ba0

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tsyz3ibYzk

Questions? Comments?

Welcome to Bring Me a Rock Day 2

In birthdate order

• Each person should tell us about their favorite feature they created for Bring Me a Rock Day 2

• Tell us what it was• How you created it• Your just-so story• And was your just-so story correct

Next

• Tell us about anything cool you did in Excel or another program to create a feature

Too Hard?

• Were there any features that anyone kind of wanted to create, but it was too difficult? (or too much work?)

Better?

• Who here got better features (in terms of goodness metric) for Bring Me a Rock Day 2, than Bring Me a Rock Day 1?

Other Interesting Observations?

Assignment 5

Assignment 5• Iterative Feature Refinement

– Select three of the features you have created in previous assignments– These features should be “among the best” of the features you have

previously created– For each of these three features, create at least five “close variants” of

these features• “time for last 3 actions” and “time for last 4 actions” are close variants• “time for last 3 actions” and “total time between help requests and next action” are

two separate features

– Using the Excel Equation Solver is a substitute for creating five “close variants”

– If you don’t use the excel equation solver• As you create the close variants for each feature, don’t just make them all at once• Make a variant• Test whether it’s better than the previous variant (by goodness metric)

– If it is, keep going in the same direction– If it isn’t, try doing the opposite or something else

Assignment 5

• Write a report that discusses your process– I took feature N– I changed it from N to N*– The goodness changed from G to G*– Then I did…

Assignment 5

• You don’t need to prepare a presentation• But be ready to discuss your features in class

Next Classes

• 10/9 RapidMiner Practice Session– Bring your RapidMiner process to class with

questions, on a laptop– We’ll learn together

• 10/14 Iterative Feature Refinement– Assignment 5 due

Upcoming Classes

• 10/16 No special session today

• 10/21 Feature Adaptation

• 10/23 Special Session on Building Prediction Models

Thank you!