Solar flares originate from magnetically active regions but not all solar active regions give rise to a flare. Therefore, the challenge of solar flare prediction benefits by an intelligent computational analysis of physics-based properties extracted from active region observables, most commonly line-ofsight or vector magnetograms of the active-region photosphere. For the purpose of flare forecasting, this study utilizes an unprecedented 171 flare-predictive active region properties, mainly inferred by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO/HMI) in the course of the European Union Horizon 2020 FLARECAST project. Using two different supervised machine learning methods that allow feature ranking as a function of predictive capability, we show that: i) an objective training and testing process is paramount for the performance of every supervised machine learning method; ii) most properties include overlapping information and are therefore highly redundant for flare prediction; iii) solar flare prediction is still -and will likely remain -a predominantly probabilistic challenge. Nishizuka et al 2018) within the recent field of space weather forecasting that relies on the availability of two ingredients; one observational and one computational. First, it is well-established that solar active regions (ARs) exclusively host major flares and therefore flare prediction needs experimental data on AR properties, associated to the photospheric and coronal magnetic field; however, coronal information has only recently started being used in the form of EUV images given as input to a deep learning network by Nishizuka et al (2018). Second, this information on AR magnetic properties can be processed for prediction purposes by means of a computational method for data analysis; machine learning has recently offered strong candidates for such methods.Since February 2010, the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO/HMI) (Scherrer et al 2012) is providing both line-of-sight and vector magnetograms of the full solar disk at a (vector magnetogram) cadence of 12 minutes. SDO/HMI magnetograms can be used for solar flare prediction according to two different approaches. First, HMI magnetograms are utilized to calculate a variety of properties either from the line-of-sight component only, from the radial component only, or from all three vector components. Various single-valued quantities, hereafter referred to as features, can be calculated from these property images through a variety of techniques (e.g., thresholding, feature recognition, etc), such that calculation of one physical property may provide multiple features as inputs to machine learning (i.e., image maximum, total, and moments). Of course, additional features that are not derived from property images may also contribute to the input dataset. Second, from a deep learning perspective, HMI images can be given as input to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that automatically perform a probabilistic f...