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Software Engineering vocabulary · Machine Learning and Data Processing

Feature engineering

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, feature engineering means: The work of creating new input variables from raw data to help a model learn, for example turning a date of birth into an age or counting a customer's purchases.

In Turkish: öznitelik mühendisliği, feature engineering

How it is used

Often the part of a project that improves a model most. Feature engineering relies on domain knowledge; typical steps are ratios, time windows, encoding categories and aggregating events. Finished features are often kept in a 'feature store'.

Example sentences

  1. Good feature engineering beat the fancy model: a simple ratio of returns to orders did most of the work.

  2. Most of the feature engineering is done in SQL so that it runs in the warehouse.

Common collocations

  • do feature engineering
  • feature engineering step
  • feature store
  • domain knowledge
  • featureA piece of functionality that users can see or use, such as a search bar, dark mode or the option to export a report.
  • modelThe result of training: a program with learned parameters that takes an input, such as an image or a sentence, and produces an output, such as a label, a number or a text.
  • variableA name in a program that stores a value, such as a number, text or list, so that the code can use or change that value later.
  • aggregateTo combine many rows of data into summary values, such as totals, counts or averages, usually grouped by a category such as day, product or region.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

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