py-evoFE: Automated Evolutionary Feature Engineering for Tabular ML in Python (Genetic Algorithms + Scikit-Learn + Polars) [P]

Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of py-evoFE (v0.3.0) — an open-source Python library that uses genetic algorithms to automatically discover, combine, and optimize feature transformations for tabular datasets. GitHub: https://github.com/tanopereira/py-evoFE PyPI: pip install py-evoFE License: MIT The Problem It Solves Feature engineering is still where most tabular ML competitions and production models are won or lost. While GBDTs like LightGBM and XGBoost excel on raw tabular data, they struggle to discover complex ratios, nested group-by aggregations, nonlinear dimensional projections, and interaction graphs on their own. Manual feature engineering is either tedious or constrained by human intuition, while brute-force feature generation explodes the feature space exponentially with colinear noise and high memory usage. What py-evoFE Does py-evoFE searches the space of possible feature recipes using genetic programming: 1. Hierarchical Chaining: Evolved features become building blocks for future generations (e.g., log(ratio(groupby_mean(x1, by=x2), x3)) ). 2. 40+ Built-in Transformers: - Non-linear arithmetic & log-ratios - Target encoding (multiclass, pooled, WoE, quantile target encodings) - String similarity (MinHash, Gap encodings) - Manifold & Dimensionality Reduction (PCA, UMAP, MCA, FAMD, Between-Group PCA) - Graph & Density Clustering (Genie, Lumbermark, MST anomaly scoring) 3. Performance & Speed: - Vectorized computation powered by Polars and PyArrow . - Matrix Hashing & Nearest-Neighbor Caching: Stateful projections (like UMAP and $K$-NN lookups) are cached via byte-hashing to eliminate redundant computation across CV folds. - Multi-Fidelity Screening: Fast low-fidelity CV screens initial populations; only promising candidates proceed to full-fidelity evaluation. 4. Island Model & Caruana Ensembling: - Multi-population parallel search across Ring, Torus, Grid, Hypercube, and Tiered topologies with Gibbs migration. - Post-search greedy Ca