I wrapped a random forest in a genetic algorithm for feature selection due to unidentifiable, group-based confounding variables. Is it bad? Is there better?

No tldr for this one, folks. I had initially posted about my issue in another sub, but didn’t get much feedback. I then read up on genetic algorithms for feature selection, and decided to give it a shot. Let me acknowledge beforehand that there’s a serious processing cost problem. I’m trying to create a classification model with clearly labeled data that has thousands of features. The data was obtained in a laboratory setting, and I’ll simplify th