---
title: Feature Discovery settings
description: How to set Feature Discovery advanced options, including feature engineering controls and feature reduction.

---

# Feature Discovery settings {: #feature-discovery-settings}

The Feature Discovery process uses a variety of heuristics to determine the list of [features to derive](fd-gen) in a DataRobot project. In **Feature Discovery Settings**, you can control which transformations DataRobot will try when deriving new features ([feature engineering controls](#feature-engineering-controls)), as well as set DataRobot to automatically remove redundant features and those with low impact ([feature reduction](#feature-reduction)).

To access **Feature Discovery Settings**, click the settings gear on the **Define Relationships** page.

## Feature engineering controls {: #feature-engineering-controls }

You can influence how DataRobot conducts feature engineering by setting feature engineering controls. You might want to do this to:

* Use your domain knowledge to guide the feature engineering process and improve the quality of the derived features.
* Speed up feature engineering.
* Improve accuracy by deriving more features, for example, using [categorical statistics](fd-gen#categorical-statistics), skewness, and kurtosis.
* Exclude specific transforms that might be too complex to explain to business stakeholders. You can exclude these features post-modeling but that adds to the complexity of the modeling process.

Set the feature engineering options in the relationship editor prior to [EDA2](eda-explained#eda2).

In **Feature Discovery Settings**, click the **Feature Engineering** tab. Consider which feature engineering transformations make the most sense for your project and select the ones you want DataRobot to try when deriving new features.

![](images/safer-feature-engineering-controls.png)

You can hover over a transformation to view a tool tip that describes it.

![](images/safer-feature-engineering-control-tool-tip.png)

??? note "Latest vs. Latest within window"

    Transformation       | Description | Default
    ---------- | ----------- |
    Latest      | Generates new features by exploring all historical data up until the end point of any defined FDWs. Note that this method ignores all FDW start points.  | Disabled
    Latest within window      | Generates new features within the defined FDW. For time-aware feature engineering, only the data within the FDW is required when making predictions. | Enabled

When you're done, click **Save changes**.

## Feature reduction {: #feature-reduction }

During Feature Discovery, DataRobot generates new features then removes the features that have low impact or are redundant. This is called *feature reduction*. You can instead include all features when building models by disabling feature reduction using the following method:

In the relationship configuration (the **Define Relationships** page), click the settings (![](images/icon-gear.png)) gear. Select the **Feature Reduction** tab and toggle off **Use supervised feature reduction**:

![](images/safer-settings-feature-reduction.png)