I am pretty new to pipelines in sklearn and I am running into this problem: I have a dataset that has a mixture of text and numbers i.e. certain columns have text only and rest have integers (or floating point numbers).
I was wondering if it was possible to build a pipeline where I can for example call LabelEncoder()
on the text features and MinMaxScaler()
on the numbers columns. The examples I have seen on the web mostly point towards using LabelEncoder()
on the entire dataset and not on select columns. Is this possible? If so any pointers would be greatly appreciated.
The way I usually do it is with a FeatureUnion
, using a FunctionTransformer
to pull out the relevant columns.
Important notes:
You have to define your functions with def
since annoyingly you can't use lambda
or partial
in FunctionTransformer if you want to pickle your model
You need to initialize FunctionTransformer
with validate=False
Something like this:
from sklearn.pipeline import make_union, make_pipeline
from sklearn.preprocessing import FunctionTransformer
def get_text_cols(df):
return df[['name', 'fruit']]
def get_num_cols(df):
return df[['height','age']]
vec = make_union(*[
make_pipeline(FunctionTransformer(get_text_cols, validate=False), LabelEncoder()))),
make_pipeline(FunctionTransformer(get_num_cols, validate=False), MinMaxScaler())))
])
Since v0.20, you can use ColumnTransformer
to accomplish this.