AI Glossary
Feature Engineering
What is Feature Engineering?
The process of selecting, transforming, and creating input variables (features) used to train a machine learning model. Good feature engineering was the primary source of model improvement in classical ML before deep learning. It remains important in structured data domains where domain expertise can significantly improve model performance.
Example in practice
A data analyst building a customer churn model would engineer a "days since last purchase" feature from raw transaction timestamps — converting a date field into a signal the model can act on.
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