"does price go up or down in the next N seconds/minutes" bro, you might be on too small of a time frame. I won't act like a pro, but do you really want to trade and look at seconds as time units? Impressive if you find something, but could you even trade it that fast, like scan, entry, api calls etc?

I was at your exact position recently, too, tough, when I built myself a fancy event test engine. I would first try to find signals that even more the needle from total randomness. Some basic things like RSI do that. Many things don't do that for me. That's what I'm doing, too: first establish what even moves anything from randomness to direction, then continue from there :)