PROFESSIONAL-DATA-ENGINEER · Question #27
You are building a model to predict whether or not it will rain on a given day. You have thousands of input features and want to see if you can improve training speed by removing some features while h
The correct answer is B. Combine highly co-dependent features into one representative feature.. Option B is correct because combining highly co-dependent (correlated) features - a technique called dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA) or feature engineering - reduces the total number of inputs without discarding the predictive signal they carry, thereby speeding up training
Question
Options
- AEliminate features that are highly correlated to the output labels.
- BCombine highly co-dependent features into one representative feature.
- CInstead of feeding in each feature individually, average their values in batches of 3.
- DRemove the features that have null values for more than 50% of the training records.
How the community answered
(25 responses)- A4% (1)
- B84% (21)
- C4% (1)
- D8% (2)
Explanation
Option B is correct because combining highly co-dependent (correlated) features - a technique called dimensionality reduction (e.g., PCA) or feature engineering - reduces the total number of inputs without discarding the predictive signal they carry, thereby speeding up training while preserving accuracy.
Why the distractors fail:
- A is backwards - features correlated with the output label are your most valuable predictors; removing them would directly harm accuracy.
- C is arbitrary and statistically unsound; averaging unrelated features together destroys meaningful signal and introduces noise with no principled basis.
- D may remove useful features unnecessarily - missing data can often be imputed, and a feature with 51% nulls might still carry strong predictive value for the rows where it exists.
Memory tip: Think "co-dependent = redundant." If two features are highly correlated with each other (not the label), they're telling the model the same story twice - merging them trims the redundancy. The key contrast to burn in: correlated with the label = keep it; correlated with another feature = candidate for combining.
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