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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

Submitted by akirajp· Mar 30, 2026Building and operationalizing data processing systems

Question

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 having a minimum effect on model accuracy. What can you do?

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)
  • A
    4% (1)
  • B
    84% (21)
  • C
    4% (1)
  • D
    8% (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.

Topics

#Feature Engineering#Dimensionality Reduction#Model Optimization#Data Preprocessing

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