Another approach is to use deep learning to discover the best representation of your problem, which means finding the most important features. This approach is also known as representation learning, and can often result in a much better performance than can be obtained with hand-designed representation. In machine learning, features are usually manually hand-crafted by researchers and domain experts. Fortunately, deep learning can extract features automatically. Of course, this doesn't mean feature engineering and domain knowledge isn’t important anymore — you still have to decide which features you put into your network. That said, neural networks have the ability to learn which features are really important and which ones aren’t. A representation learning algorithm can discover a good combination of features within a very short timeframe, even for complex tasks which would otherwise require a lot of human effort.