Step-by-Step Guide: Data Preprocessing for Machine Learning
1. Understand the Data
- Load dataset and use [Link](), [Link](), [Link]()
- Identify data types, missing values, target, categorical & numerical features
2. Handle Missing Data
- Drop: [Link]()
- Impute:
- Numerical: mean/median
- Categorical: mode
- Custom values or interpolation
3. Encode Categorical Variables
- Label Encoding (ordinal)
- One-Hot Encoding (nominal) via pd.get_dummies or OneHotEncoder
4. Feature Engineering
- Extract new features (e.g., from datetime)
- Combine/split columns, log transforms
5. Outlier Handling
- Use boxplots, scatterplots, IQR, or z-score
- Optionally remove or cap (winsorization)
6. Feature Scaling
- StandardScaler (normal distribution)
- MinMaxScaler (0-1 range)
- RobustScaler (for outliers)
7. Feature Selection / Dimensionality Reduction
- Use SelectKBest, RFE, Lasso, PCA
8. Train-Test Split
- Use train_test_split() from sklearn.model_selection
- Split before scaling or use in pipeline
9. Modeling and Evaluation
- Train model, use cross_val_score/GridSearchCV
- Evaluate: Accuracy, F1-score, ROC, etc.
Best Practice: Use a Pipeline
- Combine preprocessing & modeling in one flow