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I have a data set that has a few columns such as:

Total cost: mean = 3,000,000

Percent complete: mean = 50

final profit %: mean = 14

I know with such different orders of magnitude before I fit a linear regression I should standardize the data (using python and sklearn). The problem is there are negatives in this data that I need to keep so I don't know which type of standardization I should use? The only two I am familiar with are log transformations and StandardScaler both of which I think get rid of negatives.

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    $\begingroup$ You can apply standardization to your samples regardless if they are positive or negative. The aim of standardization is to set your sample such that they have a 0 mean and variance 1. In the log case however you need strictly positive values.. $\endgroup$
    – null
    Jun 25, 2020 at 21:07

2 Answers 2

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You can use Normalization. Normalization rescale your mean to 0 and standard deviation to 1 containing both positive and negative value.

$X_{Normalised} = \frac{X - \mu}{\sigma}$

Here $\mu$ is your original mean and $\sigma$ is your standard deviation.

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You can still use StandardScaler() as it will keep the negative values. If you think you have a few outliers, and want to reduce their influence, you can also look at RobustScaler().

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