Use a signal-risk matrix for candidates

Leakage or serving risk Expected business signal Low High Build first High signal - Low risk Features like days since last completed action before cutoff: easy to explain, available at prediction time, and likely tied to behavior. Engineer carefully High signal - High risk Features like customer tier snapshots or target encodings: valuable, but require point-in-time joins, fold-safe fitting, or explicit serving fallbacks. Maybe later Low signal - Low risk Features that are safe but weak, such as generic row metadata. Keep them out of the first iteration unless they answer a specific hypothesis. Reject or redesign Low signal -…

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