After doing these courses, I feel confident creating professional visualizations and dashboards
Shoebur RahmanProcurement Specialist, Giz Bangladesh
Course Description
High-dimensional datasets can be overwhelming and leave you not knowing where to start. Typically, you’d visually explore a new dataset first, but when you have too many dimensions the classical approaches will seem insufficient. Fortunately, there are visualization techniques designed specifically for high dimensional data and you’ll be introduced to these in this course. After exploring the data, you’ll often find that many features hold little information because they don’t show any variance or because they are duplicates of other features. You’ll learn how to detect these features and drop them from the dataset so that you can focus on the informative ones. In a next step, you might want to build a model on these features, and it may turn out that some don’t have any effect on the thing you’re trying to predict. You’ll learn how to detect and drop these irrelevant features too, in order to reduce dimensionality and thus complexity. Finally, you’ll learn how feature extraction techniques can reduce dimensionality for you through the calculation of uncorrelated principal components.
Prerequisites
Curriculum
Course outline
1
Exploring High Dimensional Data
You'll be introduced to the concept of dimensionality reduction and will learn when an why this is important. You'll learn the difference between feature selection and feature extraction and will apply both techniques for data exploration. The chapter ends with a lesson on t-SNE, a powerful feature extraction technique that will allow you to visualize a high-dimensional dataset.
- Introduction50 XP
- Finding the number of dimensions in a dataset50 XP
- Removing features without variance100 XP
- Feature selection vs. feature extraction50 XP
- Visually detecting redundant features100 XP
- Advantage of feature selection50 XP
- t-SNE visualization of high-dimensional data50 XP
- t-SNE intuition50 XP
- Fitting t-SNE to the ANSUR data100 XP
- t-SNE visualisation of dimensionality100 XP
2
Feature Selection I - Selecting for Feature Information
In this first out of two chapters on feature selection, you'll learn about the curse of dimensionality and how dimensionality reduction can help you overcome it. You'll be introduced to a number of techniques to detect and remove features that bring little added value to the dataset. Either because they have little variance, too many missing values, or because they are strongly correlated to other features.
3
Feature Selection II - Selecting for Model Accuracy
In this second chapter on feature selection, you'll learn how to let models help you find the most important features in a dataset for predicting a particular target feature. In the final lesson of this chapter, you'll combine the advice of multiple, different, models to decide on which features are worth keeping.
4
Feature Extraction
This chapter is a deep-dive on the most frequently used dimensionality reduction algorithm, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). You'll build intuition on how and why this algorithm is so powerful and will apply it both for data exploration and data pre-processing in a modeling pipeline. You'll end with a cool image compression use case.
Dimensionality Reduction in Python
Course
Complete
