Yes, I’ve done some work on feature selection. Featuretools does not currently have feature selection built-in, but that is something we are working on. Once you have your feature matrix from automated feature engineering, you can perform feature selection with a library such as Scikit-Learn which has extension feature selection methods.

I see the role of the data scientist changing over the next few years as first model tuning and then feature engineering is automated. I’m not sure if the role will go away, but I don’t think anyone will be designing models by hand in five years.

While I’m not going to predict what we’ll be doing, I think that focusing on the fundamentals of data science — computer science and statistics — and being willing and able to learn new techniques will prevent you from becoming obsolete. Much as the job “data scientist” did not exist 10 years ago, the jobs we’ll be doing 10 years from now probably don’t even exist right now!