NOTICE

The upcoming release of Featuretools 1.0.0 contains several breaking changes. Users are encouraged to test this version prior to release by installing from GitHub:

pip install https://github.com/alteryx/featuretools/archive/woodwork-integration.zip

For details on migrating to the new version, refer to Transitioning to Featuretools Version 1.0. Please report any issues in the Featuretools GitHub repo or by messaging in Alteryx Open Source Slack.


Glossary

child entity

An entity that references another entity via relationship. The “many” in a one-to-many relationship.

cutoff time

The last point in time data is allowed to be used when calculating a feature

entity

Equivalent to a table in relational database. Represented by the Entity class.

EntitySet

A collection of entities and the relationships between them. Represented by the EntitySet class.

feature

A transformation of data used for machine learning. featuretools has a custom language for defining features as described here. All features are represented by subclasses of FeatureBase.

feature engineering

The process of transforming data into representations that are better for machine learning.

instance

Equivalent to a row in a relational database. Each entity has many instances, and each instance has a value for each variable and feature defined on the entity.

parent entity

An entity that is referenced by another entity via relationship. The “one” in a one-to-many relationship.

relationship

A mapping between a parent entity and a child entity. The child entity must contain a variable referencing the ID variable on the parent entity. Represented by the Relationship class.

target entity

The entity on which we will be making a features for.

variable

Equivalent to a column in a relational database. Represented by the Variable class.