Preprocessing for Machine Learning in Python

Learn how to clean and prepare your data for machine learning!

This course covers the basics of how and when to perform data preprocessing. This essential step in any machine learning project is when you get your data ready for modeling. Between importing and cleaning your data and fitting your machine learning model is when preprocessing comes into play. You'll learn how to standardize your data so that it's in the right form for your model, create new features to best leverage the information in your dataset, and select the best features to improve your model fit. Finally, you'll have some practice preprocessing by getting a dataset on UFO sightings ready for modeling.

• Introduction to Data Preprocessing
• In this chapter you'll learn exactly what it means to preprocess data. You'll take the first steps in any preprocessing journey, including exploring data types and dealing with missing data.
• Standardizing Data
• This chapter is all about standardizing data. Often a model will make some assumptions about the distribution or scale of your features. Standardization is a way to make your data fit these assumptions and improve the algorithm's performance.
• Feature Engineering
• In this section you'll learn about feature engineering. You'll explore different ways to create new, more useful, features from the ones already in your dataset. You'll see how to encode, aggregate, and extract information from both numerical and textual features.
• Selecting Features for Modeling
• This chapter goes over a few different techniques for selecting the most important features from your dataset. You'll learn how to drop redundant features, work with text vectors, and reduce the number of features in your dataset using principal component analysis (PCA).
• Putting It All Together
• Now that you've learned all about preprocessing you'll try these techniques out on a dataset that records information on UFO sightings.