i feel like this is just the research process. My solution is to just try something that seems relevant. Soon you will realise it may not work because X. but maybe Y will work. Then you keep going, learning more about the area, the data, whatever. Stop when it works, or you have convinced yourself it wont. This is one of the reasons I think research code is always so trash, rarely did the researchers know where it was going to go at the start. And thats ok. Refactoring for production only happens well into the future.

my advice is to do something without worrying that it might not be the right thing.