Hints and Tips

Gathering the data

If you have interesting data in a CSV file or even across several databases on a single server, you are in good shape. While it's easiest to pull data into healthcareai via a single table, one can also use joins to gather data from separate tables or databases.

What's most important is the following:

• You have a column you're excited about predicting and some data that might be relevant
• If you're predicting a binary outcome (ie, 0 or 1), you have to convert the column to be Y or N.

Feature Engineering

It's almost always helpful to do some feature engineering before creating a model. Here are some practical examples of that:

• If you think the thing your predicting might have a seasonal pattern, you could convert a date-time column into columns representing DayOfWeek, DayOfMonth, WeekOfYear, etc.
• If you have rows with both a latitude and longitude, it may be beneficial to add a zip code column

Model building tips

• Start small. You can often get a good idea of model performance by starting with 10k rows instead of 1M.
• Don't throw out rows with missing values. We'll help you experiment with imputation, which may improve the model's performance.
• Prediction data with missing values will automatically be imputed, on the other hand training data with missing values has an option to be imputed or not imputed.
• Focus on new features. Rather than finding more rows of the same columns, finding or engineering better columns (ie, features) will give better results.