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Henry Thornton
Henry Thornton

Reputation: 4577

What kind of feature vectors does featuretools / DFS generate?

Are the feature vectors generated by featuretools/DFS dense or sparse or does it depend on something?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 374

Answers (1)

Seth Rothschild
Seth Rothschild

Reputation: 404

The sparseness of feature vectors generated by Featuretools will in general be dependent on

  1. the EntitySet in question and
  2. the primitives chosen.

Primitives are meant to give back dense information. While it's possible (but not helpful) to construct example EntitySets that will make the output of primitive sparse, it's more common for the primitive to give back no information than sparse information.

However, certain primitives and workflows are more likely to give back sparse than others. A big one to worry about is feature encoding, which uses one-hot. Because that's generating a vector with 1s only when a certain value occurs, an infrequently occurring categorical value immediately would be converted into a sparse vector. Using Where aggregation primitives can sometimes have similar results.

Upvotes: 3

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