A Common Misconception About Feature Scaling and Standardization
From the perspective of skewness.
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Feature scaling and standardization are common ways to alter a feature’s range.
For instance:
MinMaxScaler shrinks the range to [0,1]:
Standardization makes the mean zero and standard deviation one, etc.
It is desired because it prevents a specific feature from strongly influencing the model’s output. What’s more, it ensures that the model is more robust to variations in the data.
In the image above, the scale of Income could massively impact the overall prediction. Scaling (or standardizing) the data to a similar range can mitigate this and improve the model’s performance.
Yet, contrary to common belief, they NEVER change the underlying distribution.
Instead, they just alter the range of values.
Thus:
Normal distribution → stays Normal
Uniform distribution → stays Uniform
Skewed distribution → stays Skewed
and so on…
We can also verify this from the below illustration:
If you intend to eliminate skewness, scaling/standardization won’t help.
Try feature transformations instead.
I recently published a post on various transformations, which you can read here: Feature transformations.
👉 Over to you: While feature scaling is immensely helpful, some ML algorithms are unaffected by the scale. Can you name some algorithms?
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Find the code for my tips here: GitHub.
I like to explore, experiment and write about data science concepts and tools. You can read my articles on Medium. Also, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.