Abraham Lincoln and Predictive Modeling Project

Abraham Lincoln said, "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first four hours sharpening the axe". The same principle can be applied to a predictive modeling project. From the discussion in previous posts, we can see that most of the time are not spent on building model itself. Thus we may say, "If I had ten days to build a predictive model, I'd spend the first seven days understanding data and building feature variables that are truly relevant to the target variable".