Chapter 7. Features – How Algorithms See the World

So far in this book, we suggested a number of ways and a number of reasons for creating, extracting, or, otherwise, manipulating features. In this chapter, we will address this topic head on. The right features, sometimes called attributes, are the central component for machine learning models. A sophisticated model with the wrong features is worthless. Features are how our applications see the world. For all but the most simple tasks, we will process our features before feeding them to a model. There are many interesting ways in which we can do this, and it is such an important topic that it's appropriate to devote an entire chapter to it.

It has only been in the last decade or so that machine learning models have been routinely using tens of thousands of features or more. This allows us to tackle many different problems, such as those where our feature set is large compared to the number of samples. Two typical applications...