Gators: A Lightning-Fast Data Preprocessing And Feature Engineering Python Library

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📚 Full Documentation

What is Gators?

Gators is a library built on top of Polars, designed to streamline your entire ML workflow from raw data to production-ready models — benchmarked faster than scikit-learn and feature-engine across common preprocessing tasks (see Benchmarks below).

Built by the PSP Data Team at PayPal, Gators makes data preprocessing and feature engineering both faster and simpler.

⚡ Key Features

• 🚀 Lightning Fast: Benchmarked faster than scikit-learn and feature-engine on common preprocessing tasks
• 🔄 Unified API: Consistent sklearn-style .fit() and .transform() interface
• 📦 Production Ready: Deploy the same Python code from notebook to production
• 🎯 Comprehensive: 108 preprocessing transformers across 11 categories
• 🔗 Pipeline Support: Chain transformers seamlessly with the Pipeline class
• 📤 ONNX Export: Export fitted pipelines to ONNX for low-latency inference (most transformers supported; a handful of feature_generation_str transformers can't convert due to ONNX's limited string-tensor op support)
• 🎓 Easy to Learn: If you know sklearn, you already know Gators

📊 Benchmarks

Gators transformers are timed head-to-head against their closest scikit-learn and feature-engine equivalents (same algorithm, fit + transform, best-of-3 runs) on a 500,000-row synthetic dataset:

n/a = no equivalent implementation exists in that library. Measured on an Apple M3 Max; hardware, dataset shape, and library versions all affect absolute numbers, so results are fully reproducible with one command:

pip install -e ".[benchmarks]"
python benchmarks/run_benchmarks.py

See benchmarks/ for full methodology, caveats, and raw results.

�🛠️ What Can Gators Do?

🧹 Data Cleaning (16)

Clean and prepare your data with powerful transformers:

• CastColumns - Convert column data types
• CorrelationFilter - Remove highly correlated features
• DropColumns - Remove specified columns
• DropConstantColumns - Remove columns with constant values
• DropDuplicateColumns - Remove duplicate columns
• DropDuplicateRows - Remove duplicate rows
• DropHighNaNRatio - Remove columns with high missing value ratio
• DropLowCardinality - Remove low-cardinality columns
• DropNearConstantColumns - Remove near-constant columns
• HighCardinalityFilter - Filter high-cardinality features
• RenameColumns - Rename columns
• Replace - Replace values in data
• RoundDigits - Round numeric columns to a fixed number of decimal places
• RoundSignificantDigits - Round numeric columns to a fixed number of significant figures
• SelectColumns - Keep only specified columns
• VarianceFilter - Remove low-variance features

✂️ Clippers (5)

Detect and clip outliers:

• CustomClipper - Custom min/max bounds per column
• GaussianClipper - Clip based on mean ± n standard deviations
• IQRClipper - Clip based on interquartile range
• MADClipper - Clip based on median absolute deviation
• QuantileClipper - Clip based on quantile thresholds

🔢 Categorical Encoding (10)

Transform categorical variables with advanced encoding techniques:

• BinaryEncoder - Binary representation encoding
• CatBoostEncoder - CatBoost-style target encoding
• CountEncoder - Frequency-based encoding
• HashEncoder - Hashing trick for high-cardinality features
• LeaveOneOutEncoder - Leave-one-out target encoding
• OneHotEncoder - Classic one-hot encoding
• OrdinalEncoder - Frequency-ordered ordinal encoding
• RareCategoryEncoder - Replace rare/infrequent categories with a single label
• TargetEncoder - Target mean encoding for supervised learning
• WOEEncoder - Weight of Evidence encoding

🎯 Feature Generation - Numeric (21)

Create powerful numeric features:

Mathematical Operations:

• AsymmetryIndexFeatures - Generate asymmetry index features
• ConcentrationIndexFeatures - Generate concentration index features
• DistanceFeatures - Calculate distance features
• EntropyFeatures - Generate Shannon entropy features
• FourierFeatures - Generate Fourier basis features
• GeneralizedRatioFeatures - Generate generalized ratio features
• HHIFeatures - Herfindahl–Hirschman Index features
• IsNull - Generate null-indicator features
• MathFeatures - Apply mathematical operations between column groups
• PlanRotationFeatures - Rotate features in feature space
• PolynomialFeatures - Generate polynomial and interaction features
• RatioFeatures - Create ratio features between columns
• ScalarMathFeatures - Apply scalar operations to columns
• WeightedSumFeatures - Weighted sum of features

Aggregation & Statistics:

• GroupLagFeatures - Generate lag features by group
• GroupStatisticsFeatures - Generate group-based statistics
• RollingStatisticsFeatures - Generate rolling-window statistics
• RowStatisticsFeatures - Generate row-level statistics

Rule-based:

• ComparisonFeatures - Generate comparison features
• ConditionFeatures - Create conditional features
• RuleFeatures - Apply custom business rules

📝 Feature Generation - String (19)

Extract insights from text data:

• CharacterStatistics - Extract character-level statistics
• CombineFeatures - Concatenate selected string columns
• Contains - Binary indicator: string contains pattern
• Endswith - Binary indicator: string ends with pattern
• ExtractSubstring - Extract a fixed-position substring
• InteractionFeatures - Exhaustive pairwise string concatenation
• Length - String length
• Lower - Convert to lowercase
• NGram - Generate character or word n-gram features
• Occurrences - Count pattern occurrences
• PatternDetector - Detect regex patterns
• RegexExtractFeatures - Extract named groups via regex
• Split - Split strings on a delimiter
• SplitExtract - Split and extract the nth token
• Startswith - Binary indicator: string starts with pattern
• StringSimilarity - Fuzzy string similarity (Levenshtein / Jaro-Winkler)
• TfidfFeatures - Generate TF-IDF features
• Upper - Convert to uppercase
• WordStatistics - Extract word-level statistics

📅 Feature Generation - DateTime (8)

Unlock temporal patterns:

• BusinessTimeFeatures - Business hours/days calculations
• CyclicFeatures - Circular encoding for cyclical time features
• DiffFeatures - Calculate time differences between columns
• DurationToDatetime - Convert duration to datetime components
• HolidayFeatures - Detect and encode public holidays
• OrdinalFeatures - Extract year, month, day, hour, etc.
• TimeBinFeatures - Bin times into categorical buckets
• TimeWindowFeatures - Generate time-window aggregation features

🔄 Missing Value Imputation (6)

Handle missing data intelligently:

• BooleanImputer - Impute boolean columns (constant or most-frequent)
• GroupByImputer - Group-based imputation (median/mean per group)
• IterativeImputer - Multivariate iterative imputation
• KNNImputer - K-nearest neighbours imputation
• NumericImputer - Impute numeric columns (mean, median, mode, constant, forward/backward fill)
• StringImputer - Impute string columns (mode or constant)

📊 Discretization (7)

Convert continuous variables into bins:

• CustomDiscretizer - User-defined bin edges
• EqualLengthDiscretizer - Equal-width binning
• EqualSizeDiscretizer - Equal-frequency binning
• GeometricDiscretizer - Geometric progression binning
• KMeansDiscretizer - K-means clustering-based binning
• QuantileDiscretizer - Quantile-based binning
• TreeBasedDiscretizer - Decision tree-based optimal binning

⚖️ Feature Scalers (9)

Normalize and transform your features:

• ArcSinSquareRootScaler - Arcsine square-root transformation
• ArcSinhScaler - Inverse hyperbolic sine transformation
• BoxCox - Box-Cox power transformation
• Log1pScaler - Log1p scaling — log(1 + x)
• MinmaxScaler - Min-max normalization to [0, 1]
• PowerScaler - Power transformation
• RobustScaler - Median/IQR-based robust scaling
• StandardScaler - Z-score standardization
• YeoJohnson - Yeo-Johnson power transformation

✨ Feature Selection (6)

Select the most informative features:

• CorrelationSelector - Drop features by pairwise Pearson correlation
• FeatureStabilitySelector - Keep features stable across data splits
• InformationValueSelector - Filter by Information Value (IV)
• MutualInformationSelector - Filter by mutual information with target
• PermutationImportanceSelector - Filter by permutation feature importance
• PSIFilter - Filter by Population Stability Index

🔗 Pipeline (1)

Chain all transformers together:

• Pipeline - sklearn-compatible pipeline for chaining transformers

📤 ONNX Export

Export a fitted Pipeline or single transformer to a validated ONNX graph for low-latency, language-agnostic inference:

from gators.onnx_converters import pipeline_to_onnx

model = pipeline_to_onnx(fitted_pipeline)  # → onnx.ModelProto
# Run with onnxruntime, Triton, or any ONNX-compatible runtime

Most transformers are supported, but a handful of feature_generation_str transformers (CharacterStatistics, NGram, Occurrences, PatternDetector, RegexExtractFeatures, StringSimilarity, WordStatistics) have no ONNX converter: they rely on variable-length tokenization, list aggregates, or fuzzy string distance that ONNX's string-tensor op set cannot express. Use check_pipeline_onnx_compatibility(pipeline) to audit a pipeline before exporting - unsupported steps raise OnnxNotSupportedError (or pass through unchanged with errors="coerce").

🚀 Quick Start

import polars as pl
from gators.data_cleaning import DropHighNaNRatio, VarianceFilter
from gators.encoders import OneHotEncoder
from gators.imputers import NumericImputer
from gators.scalers import StandardScaler
from gators.pipeline import Pipeline

# Load your data
X = pl.read_csv("data.csv")

# Build a preprocessing pipeline
pipeline = Pipeline(steps=[
    ('drop_nan',  DropHighNaNRatio(max_ratio=0.5)),  # drop columns with >50% missing values
    ('impute',    NumericImputer(strategy='median')), # fill numeric nulls with column median
    ('variance',  VarianceFilter(min_std_dev=0.01)),      # remove near-zero-variance columns
    ('encode',    OneHotEncoder()),                   # one-hot encode all string/categorical columns
    ('scale',     StandardScaler()),                  # z-score standardize numeric columns
])

# Fit on training data, transform train + test
X_train_processed = pipeline.fit_transform(X_train)
X_test_processed  = pipeline.transform(X_test)

# Export to ONNX for production inference
from gators.onnx_converters import pipeline_to_onnx
onnx_model = pipeline_to_onnx(pipeline)

📦 Installation

Requires Python 3.10 or higher.

pip install gators

With ONNX export support:

pip install "gators[onnx]"

Or install from source:

git clone https://github.com/paypal/gators.git
cd gators
pip install -e .

📚 Documentation

For detailed documentation, tutorials, and API reference, visit:

https://paypal.github.io/gators/

🎯 Use Cases

Gators is perfect for:

• Fraud Detection - Extensive feature engineering for anomaly detection
• Risk Modeling - Create powerful predictive features
• Customer Analytics - Transform complex customer data
• Time Series - Rich datetime feature engineering
• NLP Tasks - String feature extraction and encoding
• Production ML - Export preprocessing to ONNX and run anywhere

🏢 Used By

Gators powers ML pipelines at:

• PayPal (internal use)

🤝 Contributing

We welcome contributions! Please check out our contributing guidelines.

📄 License

Gators is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. See LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Credits

Developed by the PSP Data Team at PayPal.

Built by data scientists, for data scientists