Standardization

A unifying transformation, like converting diverse currencies to a common standard, standardization adjusts the scale of numerical variables in a dataset by centering their values around the mean and scaling them to have a unit variance, thereby enabling more accurate comparisons and enhancing the performance of machine learning models.

Example

Consider a dataset containing information about students' test scores in various subjects, with each subject having a different grading scale. The difference in scale between these variables might make it difficult to compare students' performance across subjects or to build a machine learning model that accurately predicts overall performance. By standardizing the variables, which involves subtracting the mean and dividing by the standard deviation for each variable, the model can more accurately assess the importance of each subject and make better predictions.