AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is automated feature engineering?
Automated feature engineering (also called Deep feature synthesis): Using software to generate many candidate features automatically, typically by stacking aggregations and transformations over related tables, and then selecting the useful ones. It speeds up exploration but can produce many redundant or leaky features.
Automated feature engineering: an example
A tool such as Featuretools builds features like 'mean order value per customer' and 'count of orders in last month' from linked customer and order tables.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Backward elimination
- Bag of words
- Binary encoding
- Boruta
- Box-Cox transform
- Categorical variable
- Class imbalance
- Class weights
Where you learn it
Automated feature engineering is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.