Summary

In this chapter, we looked at features and transformers and how they can be used in the data mining pipeline. We discussed what makes a good feature and how to algorithmically choose good features from a standard set. However, creating good features is more art than science and often requires domain knowledge and experience.

We then created our own transformer using an interface that allows us to use it in scikit-learn's helper functions. We will be creating more transformers in later chapters so that we can perform effective testing using existing functions.

In the next chapter, we use feature extraction on a corpus of text documents. There are many transformers and feature types for text, each with their advantages and disadvantages.