How Does Feature Engineering Differ Between Supervised and Unsupervised Learning?

Picture This: A Puzzle with Two Players

Imagine you’re at a game night with two players solving puzzles. Player One has a guidebook, giving clear instructions on how to assemble their puzzle pieces. Player Two? They’ve got no guidebook and must figure it out by observing how the pieces fit together.

This is exactly how supervised and unsupervised learning work in machine learning. Supervised learning gets the guidebook — a clear target variable (the answer it’s trying to predict). Unsupervised learning? It’s the creative player, figuring out patterns and groups from raw data without knowing what the "right" answer looks like.

Now, here’s the fun part: the way you prepare and engineer features for these two players — or learning types — is quite different. Buckle up as we dive into these differences and make you a feature engineering maestro for both!

Supervised vs. Unsupervised Learning: A Refresher

Before we dig into feature engineering, let’s set the stage by understanding how these two approaches work. This will help you see why their feature engineering needs are like apples and oranges.

Got it? Great! Now, let’s see how this translates to the art of feature engineering.

Feature Engineering in Supervised Learning: Focusing on the Target

When you’re working with supervised learning, your north star is the target variable. You engineer features that have strong relationships with this target because they directly influence your model's ability to make accurate predictions.

Key Considerations:

1. Understand the Target:

Before engineering any features, spend time understanding the target variable. Is it numerical (like house prices) or categorical (like spam or not-spam)? This will guide your choice of techniques.

2. Avoid Data Leakage:

Data leakage is when your features "accidentally" include information that wouldn’t realistically be available at prediction time. For example, using "Customer Churn Flag" as a predictor in a churn model would be cheating — and your model will flop when it faces real-world data.

3. Prioritize Predictive Power:

The ultimate goal in supervised learning is accuracy. Every feature you create or select should contribute to improving your model's predictions.

Techniques for Feature Engineering in Supervised Learning

Here’s how you can create magic with your features:

1. Create Predictive Features

Transform raw data into features that amplify patterns related to the target.

• Example: Instead of using "Date of Purchase" as-is, calculate "Days Since Last Purchase" for a customer churn model. It’s way more insightful.

2. Perform Feature Selection

Not all features are created equal. Identify the ones that pack the most punch by:

• Calculating correlation with the target variable.
• Using algorithms like random forests to rank feature importance.

Example:

Drop features like Customer ID — they don’t contribute meaningfully to the model.

3. Engineer Interaction Features

Combine features to reveal relationships.

• Example: Instead of separate "Income" and "House Size" features, create "Income-to-House Size Ratio" for predicting mortgage approvals.

4. Handle Imbalanced Data with Custom Features

In scenarios like fraud detection, where most data is "normal" and only a tiny fraction is "fraudulent," create features that highlight differences between the classes.

• Example: Engineer a "High Transaction Frequency" feature for fraud models.

Feature Engineering in Unsupervised Learning: Embracing the Unknown

Now let’s talk about unsupervised learning. Here, there’s no target variable whispering in your ear. You’re left to uncover the hidden structure of the data, and your features need to help algorithms like k-means or PCA reveal those patterns.

Key Considerations:

1. Focus on Patterns:

Your features should emphasize relationships and groupings, rather than predicting a specific outcome.

2. Reduce Noise:

Clean, scaled, and transformed features are critical here. Noise can mislead clustering and dimensionality reduction algorithms.

3. Handle High Dimensionality:

With no target to guide you, having too many irrelevant features can confuse the model. Dimensionality reduction is often a lifesaver in unsupervised learning.

Techniques for Feature Engineering in Unsupervised Learning

Here’s how you craft features that help uncover hidden structures:

1. Perform Dimensionality Reduction

When your dataset has too many features, use methods like:

• Principal Component Analysis (PCA): Projects data into fewer dimensions while preserving variability.
• t-SNE: Helps visualize high-dimensional data in 2D or 3D.

Example:

In a dataset with 100 features, PCA can reduce it to 10 features that explain 95% of the variance.

2. Engineer Features That Highlight Similarity

For clustering tasks, create features that group similar observations together.

• Example: In customer segmentation, calculate "Average Spend per Visit" or "Days Between Purchases."

3. Scale and Normalize Features

Algorithms like k-means and hierarchical clustering rely on distance metrics, so scaling is critical.

• Use Min-Max Scaling to bring all features into the [0, 1] range.
• Use Standardization to ensure features have zero mean and unit variance.

4. Encode Categorical Features

Even in unsupervised learning, you can’t escape the need to convert text into numbers. Use:

• One-Hot Encoding for non-ordinal categories (e.g., product type).
• Embeddings for more advanced feature representations.

Real-World Example: Customer Data

Let’s say you have the following dataset:

Supervised Learning: Predicting Customer Churn

Steps:

1. Engineer "Purchase Frequency" = Purchases ÷ Age.
2. Encode "Churn" as binary (1 = Yes, 0 = No).
3. Drop Customer ID as it doesn’t affect predictions.

Unsupervised Learning: Segmenting Customers

Steps:

1. Remove the "Churn" column (no target variable here).
2. Normalize "Age" and "Income."
3. Create "Purchases-to-Income Ratio" to highlight spending habits.
4. Use PCA to reduce dimensions for faster clustering.

Comparing Feature Engineering Approaches

Bringing It All Together

Supervised learning is like solving a puzzle with a guidebook — your features need to help your model predict specific answers. Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, is the art of discovery, where your features must illuminate patterns and relationships hidden in the data.

Understanding these differences will make you a more effective data scientist, capable of crafting features that align with your model’s unique needs.

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Cohorte Team

December 9, 2024