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Lecture

Input Representation & Feature Engineering

In course

CIVIL-226: Introduction to machine learning for engineers

Machine learning is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence that allows computers to learn from data, identify patterns and make predictions. As a fundamental building block of the Computational Thinking education at EPFL, Civil students will learn ML with ...

Description

This lecture introduces the concepts of input representation and feature engineering in machine learning. It covers the role of input, different types of features, handling missing values, and techniques like data normalization, feature expansion, and imputation. The instructor explains how to transform raw data into meaningful feature vectors, the importance of clever feature design, and methods to preprocess data for machine learning algorithms.

Instructors (2)

Olga Fink

Alexandre Massoud Alahi

Alexandre Alahi is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL. He spent five years at Stanford University as a Post-doc and Research Scientist after obtaining his Ph.D. from EPFL. His research enables machines to perceive the world and make decisions in the context of transportation problems and smart environments. He has worked on the theoretical challenges and practical applications of socially-aware Artificial Intelligence, i.e., systems equipped with perception and social intelligence. He was awarded the Swiss NSF early and advanced researcher grants for his work on predicting human social behavior. He won the CVPR Open Source Award (2012) for his work on Retina-inspired image descriptors, and the ICDSC Challenge Prize (2009) for his sparsity-driven algorithm that has tracked more than 100 million pedestrians to date. His research has been covered internationally by BBC, abc, PBS, Euronews, Wall street journal, and other national news outlets around the world. Alexandre has also co-founded multiple startups such as Visiosafe, and won several startup competitions. He was elected as one of the Top 20 Swiss Venture leaders in 2010.

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Feature (machine learning)

In machine learning and pattern recognition, a feature is an individual measurable property or characteristic of a phenomenon. Choosing informative, discriminating and independent features is a crucial element of effective algorithms in pattern recognition, classification and regression. Features are usually numeric, but structural features such as strings and graphs are used in syntactic pattern recognition. The concept of "feature" is related to that of explanatory variable used in statistical techniques such as linear regression.

Feature engineering

Feature engineering or feature extraction or feature discovery is the process of extracting features (characteristics, properties, attributes) from raw data. Due to deep learning networks, such as convolutional neural networks, that are able to learn it by itself, domain-specific- based feature engineering has become obsolete for vision and speech processing.

Feature learning

In machine learning, feature learning or representation learning is a set of techniques that allows a system to automatically discover the representations needed for feature detection or classification from raw data. This replaces manual feature engineering and allows a machine to both learn the features and use them to perform a specific task. Feature learning is motivated by the fact that machine learning tasks such as classification often require input that is mathematically and computationally convenient to process.

Machine learning

Machine learning (ML) is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines 'discover' their 'own' algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass results of many previous approaches.

Online machine learning

In computer science, online machine learning is a method of machine learning in which data becomes available in a sequential order and is used to update the best predictor for future data at each step, as opposed to batch learning techniques which generate the best predictor by learning on the entire training data set at once. Online learning is a common technique used in areas of machine learning where it is computationally infeasible to train over the entire dataset, requiring the need of out-of-core algorithms.

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