Categorical Encoding: Text columns with ≤ 20 unique values are automatically One-Hot Encoded.

High Cardinality & IDs: Text columns with > 20 unique values or ID-like names are dropped to prevent feature explosion.

Date Parsing: Dates and timestamps are extracted into Year, Month, and Day numeric features.

Missing Values: Missing numeric values are imputed using the column median to maintain robustness against outliers.

Feature Scaling: All features are standardized to zero mean and unit variance (StandardScaler) before analysis. This prevents large-range features from dominating algorithms like PCA.