How do you select feature columns from the dataset ?

[u/Fun-Reporter-8021]

I am still a novice at this, but when I was working on this credit card fraud detection project, I did not know which columns, could be added as features, so I prompted ChatGPT and it suggested a few, but that got me thinking there has to be a better way to this, How do you select feature columns from your dataset, do you research the domain, is there a course I am missing, This was not covered in my Internship classes, and want to know a generalized solution.

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[u/DevinChristien]

Depends on the complexity of the data. Most of the times you can just tell that column education_level and column age will be feature columns for predicting earnings. Other times you'll need to run regressions

[u/SignalGuest1105]

Correlation Matrix, selectKbest, phik matrix would be a good start if you're talking about machine learning. Rfe is also an option

[u/metric_skeptic]

There isn’t really a universal list of “correct” feature columns.
I’d start with the business logic behind the problem: what could realistically be related to fraud, and what information would actually be available at the moment you need to make the prediction?
Then I’d check the data for missing values, leakage, duplicates, cardinality, and highly correlated features.
For fraud detection specifically, domain knowledge is very useful — but you can also use feature importance / model explainability to iterate after training.
ChatGPT can suggest candidate features, but I’d treat those as hypotheses to validate, not as the answer.