I believe that scaling would be quadratic; but yes, more features (variables) isn't always better. However, you can't know which features carry information unt

I believe that scaling would be quadratic; but yes, more features (variables) isn't always better. However, you can't know which features carry information until you collect and analyze them. For a problem like fraud -- where "expert" input probably would not allow you to figure out which features you need ahead of time -- it was almost certainly more reasonable to gather all the data and then, after the fact, perform feature selection[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_selection