Feature Engineering and Selection

The book is timely and needed. The interest in all things 'data science' morphed into everybody pretending to do, or know, Machine Learning. Kuhn and Johnson happen to actually know this-as evidenced by their earlier and still-popular tome entitled 'Applied Predictive Modeling.' The proposed 'Feature Engineering and Selection' builds on this and extends it. I expect it to become as popular with a wide reach as both a textbook, self-study material, and reference. ~Dirk Eddelbuettel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As a reviewer, it has been exciting and edifying to see this book develop into what is likely to become one of the foundational works on feature engineering. It is launching propitiously on the current tide of interest in both interpretable models and AutoML. ~Robert Horton, Microsoft In recent years, the statistics literature has featured new developments in modeling and predictive analytics. Approaches such as cross-validation and statistical/machine learning techniques have become widespread. The author's previous book ( Applied Predictive Modeling , APM) provided a wide-ranging introduction and integration of these methods and suggested a workflow in R to carry out exploratory and confirmation analyses. With this project, the authors have identified an important and interesting component of these methods that describes building better models by focusing on the predictors (feature engineering)...The authors focus on the variables that go into the model (and how they are represented) and argue that such issues are as important (or more important) than the particular methods that are applied to an analysis...The proposed book is likely to serve as a textbook (for a number of undergraduate and graduate courses in a variety of disciplines) and reference (for a large number of statisticians seeking principled and well-organized modeling). ~Nicholas Horton, Amherst College I think this book is great and a joy to read...I like the pragmatic and practical approach taken in the book, and the examples given are very illustrative. The emphasis on how and when to use resampling is refreshing and something that the community needs to hear more. ~Andreas C. Muller, Columbia University The book is timely and needed. The interest in all things 'data science' morphed into everybody pretending to do, or know, Machine Learning. Kuhn and Johnson happen to actually know this-as evidenced by their earlier and still-popular tome entitled 'Applied Predictive Modeling.' The proposed 'Feature Engineering and Selection' builds on this and extends it. I expect it to become as popular with a wide reach as both a textbook, self-study material, and reference. ~Dirk Eddelbuettel, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As a reviewer, it has been exciting and edifying to see this book develop into what is likely to become one of the foundational works on feature engineering. It is launching propitiously on the current tide of interest in both interpretable models and AutoML. ~Robert Horton, Microsoft In recent years, the statistics literature has featured new developments in modeling and predictive analytics. Approaches such as cross-validation and statistical/machine learning techniques have become widespread. The author's previous book ( Applied Predictive Modeling , APM) provided a wide-ranging introduction and integration of these methods and suggested a workflow in R to carry out exploratory and confirmation analyses. With this project, the authors have identified an important and interesting component of these methods that describes building better models by focusing on the predictors (feature engineering)...The authors focus on the variables that go into the model (and how they are represented) and argue that such issues are as important (or more important) than the particular methods that are applied to an analysis...The proposed book is likely to serve as a textbook (for a number of undergraduate and graduate courses in a variety of disciplines) and reference (for a large number of statisticians seeking principled and well-organized modeling). ~Nicholas Horton, Amherst College I think this book is great and a joy to read...I like the pragmatic and practical approach taken in the book, and the examples given are very illustrative. The emphasis on how and when to use resampling is refreshing and something that the community needs to hear more. ~Andreas C. Muller, Columbia University