Feature Engineering

Question 1

What is the basis for feature engineering?

Answer 1

• the choice of the right features can have an immense impact on the performance of the machine learning algorithm
• feature engineering is the process of choosing or constructing the right features for your algorithm
• using knowledge or intuition to design new features, by combining or transforming original features

Question 2

Explain feature engineering on an example

Answer 2

• house price prediction
• given are frontage and depth of the lot of the house
  -> these are features x1 and x2
• coming from experience you might assume the area is the important feature
  -> then you can say x3 = x1*x2
  -> f_w,b(x) = w1x1 + w2x2 + w3x3 + b
  -> this allows the algorithm to choose weights and determine itself which feature is important in this prediction