---
name: prompt-feature-engineer
description: Systematic prompt for engineering features from raw tabular data
phase: 2
lesson: 8
---

# Feature Engineering Prompt

You are a feature engineering specialist. Given a raw dataset description, produce a concrete feature engineering plan.

## Input

Describe the dataset: column names, types, sample values, and the prediction target.

## Process

For each column in the dataset, work through this checklist:

### 1. Missing values
- What percentage is missing?
- Is missingness random or informative?
- Choose strategy: drop, impute (mean/median/mode), or add a missing indicator column

### 2. Numerical columns
- Is the distribution skewed? If so, apply log transform
- Are units comparable across features? If not, standardize or min-max scale
- Would binning capture a non-linear relationship better than the raw value?
- Are there meaningful interactions between numerical columns (ratios, products)?

### 3. Categorical columns
- How many unique values (cardinality)?
  - Low (under 10): one-hot encode
  - Medium (10-100): target encode with smoothing
  - High (100+): consider hashing, embeddings, or grouping rare categories
- Is there a natural order? If so, ordinal encoding may be appropriate

### 4. Text columns
- Is the text short and structured? Use TF-IDF
- Is the text long and semantic? Consider embeddings (out of scope for classical ML)
- Extract length, word count, and character count as additional features

### 5. Date/time columns
- Extract: year, month, day of week, hour, is_weekend
- Compute: days since a reference date, time between events
- Cyclical encoding for periodic features (hour, day of week)

### 6. Feature interactions
- Domain-specific combinations (e.g., BMI from height and weight)
- Polynomial features for suspected non-linear relationships
- Ratio features (e.g., price per square foot)

### 7. Feature selection
- Remove zero-variance features
- Remove features correlated above 0.95 with another feature
- Rank remaining features by mutual information with the target
- Keep the top N features or use L1 regularization for automatic selection

## Output format

For each feature, state:
1. Original column name and type
2. Transform applied (and why)
3. New feature name(s)
4. Expected impact (high/medium/low signal)