IIFE: Interaction Information Based Automated Feature Engineering
This work addresses the problem of making feature engineering more accessible and efficient for data science practitioners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing AutoFE methods.
The authors tackled automated feature engineering by introducing IIFE, a new algorithm that uses interaction information to identify synergistic feature pairs, and demonstrated its superior performance over existing methods while also addressing experimental setup issues in the literature.
Automated feature engineering (AutoFE) is the process of automatically building and selecting new features that help improve downstream predictive performance. While traditional feature engineering requires significant domain expertise and time-consuming iterative testing, AutoFE strives to make feature engineering easy and accessible to all data science practitioners. We introduce a new AutoFE algorithm, IIFE, based on determining which feature pairs synergize well through an information-theoretic perspective called interaction information. We demonstrate the superior performance of IIFE over existing algorithms. We also show how interaction information can be used to improve existing AutoFE algorithms. Finally, we highlight several critical experimental setup issues in the existing AutoFE literature and their effects on performance.