Dimensionality Reduction in Python

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.

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.

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.

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.