Feature Engineering for Automated Machine Learning

One of the biggest challenges in machine learning workflows is identifying which inputs in your data will provide the best signals for training predictive models. For image data and other unstructured formats, deep learning models are showing large improvements over prior approaches, but for data already in structured formats, the benefits are less obvious. At Zynga, I've been exploring feature generation methods for shallow learning problems, where our data is already in a structured format, and the challenge is to translate thousands of records per user into single records that summarize user activity. Once you have the ability to translate raw tracking events into user summaries, you can apply a variety of supervised and unsupervised learning methods to your application. I've been leveraging the Featuretools library to significantly reduce my time spent building predictive models, and it's unlocked a new class of problems that data scientists can address.