AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is datetime features?
Datetime features: Useful numbers and flags extracted from a timestamp, such as year, month, day of week, hour, is_weekend, is_holiday and days since an event. Raw timestamps are rarely useful to models, but these components expose patterns like seasonality.
Datetime features: an example
From an order timestamp you extract day_of_week and is_festival_week, capturing the Diwali demand spike.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Discretization
- Domain knowledge features
- Dummy variable
- Dummy variable trap
- Duplicate removal
- Embedded method
- Entity embedding
- Equal-frequency binning
Where you learn it
Datetime features is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.