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Lets look for example, at the forecast the sales of a retail outlet.

If I understood the concept correctly, than a lagged feature would be the sales of a previous month t−1.

Would it make sense/is it common practice to create a lagged feature of a feature? For example number of customers and number of customers of a previous month t-1.

I'd be worried by doing so, that I'd give too much weight to unimportant features.

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Lagged values of features make sense with time series data, this is usually fundamental in time series analysis (because of autocorrelation). Now, whether you should include a lag or not of a feature is a different question, one that is very much data and model dependent, so we cannot answer this definitively.

One thing you might check is the aforementioned autocorrelation, if a feature has autocorrelation then maybe you should include lags, if however there is no autocorrelation then lags are probably useless.

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  • $\begingroup$ Alright, so I'd have to look at the partial auto correlation plots for each feature as well? $\endgroup$
    – Romero Azzalini
    Mar 17, 2022 at 13:37
  • $\begingroup$ @RomeroAzzalini It would help. $\endgroup$
    – user2974951
    Mar 18, 2022 at 7:03

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