AI engineering glossary · Feature engineering data prep
What is power transform?
Power transform (also called PowerTransformer): A family of monotonic functions, such as square root, cube root, Box-Cox and Yeo-Johnson, that raise values to a power to make a distribution more symmetric and closer to normal. The best power is usually estimated from the data.
Power transform: an example
Applying a square root to a right-skewed count feature such as website visits per user pulls in the long tail before fitting a linear model.
Related terms
More Feature engineering data prep terms
- Quantile transform
- Rare category grouping
- Ratio feature
- Recursive feature elimination
- Robust scaling
- Rolling statistics
- Sample weights
- SMOTE
Where you learn it
Power transform is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.