Are there any packages and/or related functions for data transformation a-la a neural network? By this, I mean something like a package called data_transform (which I made up off the top of my head) that, when used like this:
data_transform(mydata)
will give natural logarithms, weird interactions with all of the other variables, etc. for all of the numeric variables in the data.
I know relying on a package/function like that would be incredibly bad for research purposes -- I'm just curious if one exists
I don't know any such package, but there is a product from h2o.ai called Driverless AI that does something like that and more. I don't think they have R client (yet?), but as an exploratory stage you can use even interactively.
I watched a recording of a demo interfacing with R just this week (company internal so cannot share). I think this may have used Driverless AI, but it may well have been one of the other h2o components.
An auto-encoder does something similar to what you're asking about, i.e. it generates an encoding of the data that includes interactions and transformation.
It may have been their general h2o thingy with h2o.automl.
To be honest, I don't see why they have 2 products doing more or less the same thing, but AutoML is available in R, while Driverless AI is not (and not even in a pipeline - pdf, p.5)