Standardization & Normalization

So you've collected all your data and now it's time to run your machine learning project. In the data you have collected there will be the features which all have two important properties; the unit and the magnitude. For example, the feature 'age', has units of years and the magnitude is the value.

Each feature in your dataset will have both different magnitudes and units. Since algorithms that compute the distance between the features are biased towards numerically larger values it is important that you scale down this data for your ML algorithm.

The two most common techniques to do this are normalization and standardization. Let's take a closer look at the two.