Feature Selection Tutorial with Python Examples
This is a tutorial paper aimed at practitioners and researchers in data analytics, offering incremental guidance on implementing feature selection methods.
The paper provides an overview of feature selection methods in machine learning, focusing on supervised techniques and including practical Python examples to illustrate their application.
In Machine Learning, feature selection entails selecting a subset of the available features in a dataset to use for model development. There are many motivations for feature selection, it may result in better models, it may provide insight into the data and it may deliver economies in data gathering or data processing. For these reasons feature selection has received a lot of attention in data analytics research. In this paper we provide an overview of the main methods and present practical examples with Python implementations. While the main focus is on supervised feature selection techniques, we also cover some feature transformation methods.