Tool Review: Can FeatureTools simplify the process of Feature Engineering?

Feature Engineering is a crucial step in many machine learning projects, but can be difficult and time consuming if you aren't already deeply familiar with the data and/or domain. So when I came across the FeatureTools framework, which promises to make Feature Engineering faster and easier, I was excited to try it out. FeatureTools allows you to setup Entities and relationships in your data and can then automatically generate tens to hundreds of new features for you. I jumped in to try to use FeatureTools on the Ames Housing Data set, which seemed ideal for Feature Engineering. However, I was getting some strange results and so decided to back off and try it out on the much simpler Titanic data set.