Data engineering with SQL – an example case

For this chapter, let's pretend you secured a predictive analytics assignment with a cardiology practice located in the United States. The practice wants you to predict which patients are at risk of dying within 6 months of their visit to the clinic. They make their data available to you in the form of a database that includes six tables. For simplicity, we truncate the database to include the information for five patients only. Our task is to manipulate the data using the SQL language to consolidate it into a single table so that it can be used for machine learning. We will first go over the patients in the database and the database structure. Then, we will introduce basic SQL concepts for engineering and manipulate the data into a form amenable to machine learning.