(adapted from Chapter 13 of the Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications) After a first pass of training and evaluating a model, you may find you need to improve its results. Here is a checklist of ten practical actions that I’ve found usually help: Transform real-valued inputs to be approximately Normal in distribution. Regression, for instance, behaves better if the inputs are Gaussian; extremes have too much influence on squared-error. For variables that are typically log-normally distributed, like income, this involves transforming the variable via a logarithm or the more general Box-Cox function. Remove outliers.
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