Data Preprocessing and

Feature Engineering
Techniques
@ AIMS Cameroon
25 Sept- 14 Oct, 2023

Rockefeller,
Stellenbosch University, South Africa
Who am I ?

• Data Scientist Consultant and

Trainer

• My name is Rockefeller.
• PhD Candidate in A.I.,
Stellenbosch University, South
• You can call me Tonton Rock if
Africa.
you like

• I was born in Douala, Cameroon. • Research focuses on Deep

Learning methods applied to
Dynamical Systems.

rockefeller@aims.ac.za
 FACTS

• Fitting models with raw data is

(often) the guarantee of building
biased models.

• Data literacy on the

African continent is still quite low.
 Data Science Project Life Cycle Simple! Right?

Problem Statement Deployment

Data Collection Evaluation

Data preprocessing Modeling

 Data Science Project Life Cycle Well, life is not that
simple!

Problem Statement Feedback Deployment

Data Collection Evaluation

Data preprocessing Modeling

 Data Science Project Life Cycle Well, life is not that
simple!

Problem Statement Feedback Deployment

Data Collection Evaluation

Data preprocessing Modeling

 Data Science Project Life Cycle Well, life is not that
simple!

Problem Statement Feedback Deployment

Data Collection Evaluation

Data preprocessing Modeling

 Data Reading, Data
visualization, Data cleaning,
Data normalization
on

i.i.d Data
Time Series
Image Data

Text Data
 Part 0 : The Data Science Ecosystem

1. The Data Science Ecosystem

2. Getting started with Jupyter and Colab

3. Introduction to Python for Data Science

 Part 1 : Dealing with i.i.d. data
1. Working with Series and DataFrames

2. Data Reading Methods

3. Introducing Features and Observations

4. Handling Text Data

5. Grouping the Data

6. Basic Data Explorations

7. Data Organization Methods

8. Customizing Functions
 Part 2 : Dealing with Time Series

1. Working with Time Data

2. Basic Data Manipulation on Time Series

3. Advanced Manipulation on Time Series

4. Framing Time Series for Machine Learning

 Part 3 : Dealing with image data

1. Introduction to Image Data

2. Image Pre-processing operations

3. Advanced Image Pre-processing operations

4. Feature Extraction from Image

5. Preparing Image Data for Model Training

 Part 4 : Dealing with Text Data

1. Introduction to Text Data

2. Text Mining Operations

3. Feature Extraction from Text Data

4. Word Embeddings
 Some tips!!!

1. It is a practical data analysis course, not a

programming course!!!

2. Focus on building your data literacy, not on

copy pasting codes.

3. Do not code while I am teaching, you will have

plenty of time for that.
Tips for success

1. Ask Questions
Tips for success

1. Ask Questions

2. Ask Questions again

Tips for success

1. Ask Questions

2. Ask Questions again

3. Ask Questions again and again

 Course Outline

Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

Lectures Lectures • Quiz 1 Lectures
• Lectures Lectures
• Assignment 1
(release)

Lectures • Lectures Lectures • Quiz 3

• Quiz 2 • Lectures • Lectures
• Assignment 2
(release)

• Lectures Lectures • Lectures Lectures Group

• Group Assignment • Quiz 4 Presentations
(release)