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.

Level: intermediateTopic: Feature engineering data prep

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

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.

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