To reproduce just increase your sample size and watch degrees of freedom increase without changing anything else. This is incorrect and unexpected. Here is all I can find from the documentation:
"It is in fact highly recommended for your strategy to have as little configurable parameters (degrees of freedom) as possible."
https://strategyquant.com/doc/optimization-profile-system-parameter-permutation-strategyquant/Interestingly, this is already an area of confusion for some people:
"Building Winning Algorithmic Trading Systems: A Trader's Journey From Data Mining to Monte Carlo Simulation to Live Trading (Wiley Trading)" by Kevin Davey, for instance we believe in this book Degrees of freedom is incorrectly defined as discussed here:
https://roadmap.strategyquant.com/tasks/sq4_3414However the fact remains all I did was add some more data and degrees of freedom went higher for the exact same strategies.
---EDIT---
I've been corrected in this thread, nothing was incorrectly defined:
https://strategyquant.com/forum/topic/degrees-of-freedomdof-bigger-is-better/Rob Pardo is talking about degrees of freedom remaining in the data expressed as a percent. Kevin Davey is talking about degrees of freedom in the strategy.
Currently this stat is neither. Please select one of these two logical choices and stick with it. I suggest making it simply "degrees of freedom in the strategy" like it was before and a new column could be created for "degrees of freedom remaining in the data as a percent." (Hey look! I suggested this years ago!
https://roadmap.strategyquant.com/tasks/sq4_3414 )