Symmetric uncertainty-based feature selection for high-dimensional data

High-dimensional datasets with low sample sizes (HDLSS) are pivotal in the fields of biology and bioinformatics. One of core objective of HDLSS is to select most informative features and discarding redundant or irrelevant features. This is particularly crucial in bioinformatics, where accurate feature (gene) selection can lead to breakthroughs in drug development and provide insights into disease diagnostics. Despite its importance, identifying optimal features is still a significant challenge in HDLSS. To address this challenge, we propose an effective feature selection method that combines gradual permutation filtering with a heuristic tribrid search strategy, specifically tailored for HDLSS contexts. The proposed method considers inter-feature interactions and leverages feature rankings during the search process. In addition, a new performance metric for the HDLSS that evaluates both the number and quality of selected features is suggested. Through the comparison of the benchmark dataset with existing methods, the proposed method reduced the average number of selected features from 37.8 to 5.5 and improved the performance of the prediction model, based on the selected features, from 0.855 to 0.927. The proposed method effectively selects a small number of important features and achieves high prediction performance.

High-dimensional data often contain noisy and redundant features, posing challenges for accurate and efficient feature selection. To address this, a dynamic multitask learning framework is proposed, which integrates competitive learning and knowledge transfer within an evolutionary optimization setting. The framework begins by generating two complementary tasks through a multi-criteria strategy that combines multiple feature relevance indicators, ensuring both global comprehensiveness and local focus. These tasks are optimized in parallel using a competitive particle swarm optimization algorithm enhanced with hierarchical elite learning, where each particle learns from both winners and elite individuals to avoid premature convergence. To further improve optimization efficiency and diversity, a probabilistic elite-based knowledge transfer mechanism is introduced, allowing particles to selectively learn from elite solutions across tasks. Experimental results on 13 high-dimensional benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves superior classification accuracy with fewer selected features compared to several state-of-the-art methods. Across 13 benchmarks, the proposed method achieves the highest accuracy on 11 out of 13 datasets and the fewest features on eight out of 13, with an average accuracy of 87.24% and an average dimensionality reduction of 96.2% (median 200 selected features), clearly validating its effectiveness in balancing exploration, exploitation, and knowledge sharing for robust feature selection.

Feature selection (FS) is a very important pre-processing technique in machine learning and data mining. It aims to select a small subset of relevant and informative features from the original feature space that may contain many irrelevant, redundant and noisy features. Feature selection usually leads to better performance, interpretability, and lower computational cost. In the literature, FS methods are categorized into three main approaches: Filters, Wrappers, and Embedded. In this paper we introduce a new feature selection method called graph feature selection (GFS). The main steps of GFS are the following: first, we create a weighted graph where each node corresponds to each feature and the weight between two nodes is computed using a matrix of individual and pairwise score of a Decision tree classifier. Second, at each iteration, we split the graph into two random partitions having the same number of nodes, then we keep moving the worst node from one partition to another until the global modularity is converged. Third, from the final best partition, we select the best ranked features according to a new proposed variable importance criterion. The results of GFS are compared to three well-known feature selection algorithms using nine benchmarking datasets. The proposed method shows its ability and effectiveness at identifying the most informative feature subset.

High dimension and complexity of network high-dimensional data lead to poor feature selection effect network high-dimensional data. To effectively solve this problem, feature selection algorithms for high-dimensional network data based on supervised discriminant projection (SDP) have been designed. The sparse representation problem of high-dimensional network data is transformed into an Lp norm optimization problem, and the sparse subspace clustering method is used to cluster high-dimensional network data. Dimensionless processing is carried out for the clustering processing results. Based on the linear projection matrix and the best transformation matrix, the dimensionless processing results are reduced by combining the SDP. The sparse constraint method is used to achieve feature selection of high-dimensional data in the network, and the relevant feature selection results are obtained. The experimental findings demonstrate that the suggested algorithm can effectively cluster seven different types of data and converges when the number of iterations approaches 24. The F1 value, recall, and precision are all kept at high levels. High-dimensional network data feature selection accuracy on average is 96.9%, and feature selection time on average is 65.1 milliseconds. The selection effect for network high-dimensional data features is good.

This paper proposes a feature selection method based on a hybrid optimization algorithm that combines the Golden Jackal Optimization (GJO) and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). The primary objective of this method is to create an effective data dimensionality reduction technique for eliminating redundant, irrelevant, and noisy features within high-dimensional datasets. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese idiom "Chai Lang Hu Bao," hybrid algorithm mechanisms, and cooperative behaviors observed in natural animal populations, we amalgamate the GWO algorithm, the Lagrange interpolation method, and the GJO algorithm to propose the multi-strategy fusion GJO-GWO algorithm. In Case 1, the GJO-GWO algorithm addressed eight complex benchmark functions. In Case 2, GJO-GWO was utilized to tackle ten feature selection problems. Experimental results consistently demonstrate that under identical experimental conditions, whether solving complex benchmark functions or addressing feature selection problems, GJO-GWO exhibits smaller means, lower standard deviations, higher classification accuracy, and reduced execution times. These findings affirm the superior optimization performance, classification accuracy, and stability of the GJO-GWO algorithm.

Stock market prediction is a very noisy problem and the use of any additional information to increase accuracy is necessary. In this paper, for the stock daily return prediction problem, the set of features is expanded to include indicators not only for the stock to be predicted itself but also a set of other stocks and currencies. Afterwards, different feature selection and classification methods are utilized for prediction. The daily close returns of the 3 most traded stocks (GARAN, THYAO, and ISCTR) in Borsa Istanbul (BIST) are predicted using indicators computed on those stocks, indicators for all the other stocks listed in the BIST100 index, and indicators on the dollar-gold prices. Twenty-five different indicators on daily stock prices are computed to form feature vectors for each trading day. These feature vectors are assigned class labels according to the daily close returns. Expanding the feature space with BIST100 stocks features results in a high dimensional feature space, with possibly noisy or irrelevant features. Therefore, feature selection methods are utilized to select the most informative features. In order to determine relevance scores of features, fast filter-based methods, gain ratio and relief, are used. Experiments are performed based on individual stock features, dollar-gold features (DG), BIST100 stock features (BIST100), and a combination of BIST100 and DG with and without feature selection. Using the gain ratio feature selection with a gradient boosting machine (GBM), the movements of GARAN stock were predicted with an accuracy of 0.599 and an F-measure of 0.614. For THYAO, the relief feature selection with the GBM gave an accuracy of 0.558, and for ISCTR, the gain ratio feature selection with logistic regression achieved an accuracy of 0.581. It was found that using BIST100 stock features boosts classification results for all stocks in terms of accuracy.

In original data, there may exist redundant features, irrelevant features, noisy features besides informative features. Extracting informative features while eliminating the others is the goal of feature selection. This paper proposed a new feature selection algorithm based on Relief algorithm and SVM-RFE algorithm, and it is strongly targeted to eliminate the unnecessary features. Finally, We test the proposed method on three data sets from UCI, and treat accuracy, size of optimal subset, time-cost as evaluations, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has a better performance than Relief algorithm and SVM-RFE algorithm except time-cost.

With the continuous development of Internet technology, data gradually present a complicated and high-dimensional trend. These high-dimensional data have a large number of redundant features and irrelevant features, which bring great challenges to the existing machine learning algorithms. Feature selection is one of the important research topics in the fields of machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, and it is also an important means in the data preprocessing stage. Feature selection is to look for the optimal feature subset from the original feature set, which would improve the classification accuracy and reduce the machine learning time. The traditional feature selection algorithm tends to ignore the kind of feature which has a weak distinguishing capacity as a monomer, whereas the feature group’s distinguishing capacity is strong. Therefore, a new dynamic interaction feature selection (DIFS) algorithm is proposed in this paper. Initially, under the theoretical framework of interactive information, it redefines the relevance, irrelevance and redundancy of the features. Secondly, it offers the computational formulas for calculating interactive information. Finally, under the eleven data sets of UCI and three different classifiers, namely, KNN, SVM and C4.5, the DIFS algorithm increases the classification accuracy of the FullSet by 3.2848% and averagely decreases the number of features selected by 15.137. Hence, the DIFS algorithm can not only identify the relevance feature effectively, but also identify the irrelevant and redundant features. Moreover, it can effectively improve the classification accuracy of the data sets and reduce the feature dimensions of the data sets.

Feature Selection (FS) has become one of the most active research topics in the area of data mining. It performs to remove redundant and noisy features from high-dimensional data sets. A good feature selection has several advantages for a learning algorithm such as reducing computational cost, increasing its classification accuracy and improving result comprehensibility. In the supervised FS methods various feature subsets are evaluated using an evaluation function or metric to select only those features which are related to the decision classes of the data under consideration. However, for many data mining applications, decision class labels are often unknown or incomplete, thus indicating the significance of unsupervised feature selection. However, in unsupervised learning, decision class labels are not provided. The problem is that not all features are important. Some of the features may be redundant, and others may be irrelevant and noisy. In this paper, a novel unsupervised feature selection in mammogram image, using rough set based measures, is proposed. A typical mammogram image processing system generally consists of mammogram image acquisition, preprocessing of image, segmentation, features extracted from the segmented mammogram image. The proposed method is used to select features from data set, the method is compared with existing rough set based supervised feature selection methods and classification performance of both methods are recorded and demonstrates the efficiency of the method.

Feature selection is the preliminary step in machine learning and data mining. It identifies the most important and relevant features within a dataset by eliminating the redundant or irrelevant features. The substantial benefits may include an improved performance in terms of high prediction accuracy, reduced computational complexity, and simply interpretable underlying models. In this paper, we present a novel framework to investigate and understand the importance of Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) in feature selection for very high-dimensional datasets. We construct a binary feature selection tree where each node represents one of the two feature states: a feature is selected or not. The search starts with an empty root node reflecting that no feature is selected. Then, the search tree is expanded by adding nodes in an incremental fashion through MCTS-based simulations. Following tree and default policy, every iteration generates an initial feature subset, where a filter is used to select the top k features forming the candidate feature subset. The classification accuracy is used as the goodness or reward of the candidate feature subset and propagated backward up to the root node following the active path. Finally, the candidate subset with highest reward is selected as the best feature subset. Experiments are performed on 30 real-world datasets, including 14 very high-dimensional microarray datasets, and results are also compared with state-of-the-art methods in the literature, which proves the efficacy, validity, and significance of the proposed method.

Text classification has been highlighted as the key process to organize online texts for better communication in the Digital Media Age. Text classification establishes classification rules based on text features, so the accuracy of feature selection is the basis of text classification. Facing fast-increasing Chinese electronic documents in the digital environment, scholars have accumulated quite a few algorithms for the feature selection for the automatic classification of Chinese texts in recent years. However, discussion about how to adapt existing feature selection algorithms for various types of Chinese texts is still inadequate. To address this, this study proposes three improved feature selection algorithms and tests their performance on different types of Chinese texts. These include an enhanced CHI square with mutual information (MI) algorithm, which simultaneously introduces word frequency and term adjustment (CHMI); a term frequency–CHI square (TF–CHI) algorithm, which enhances weight calculation; and a term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) algorithm enhanced with the extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) algorithm, which improves the algorithm’s ability of word filtering (TF–XGBoost). This study randomly chooses 3000 texts from six different categories of the Sogou news corpus to obtain the confusion matrix and evaluate the performance of the new algorithms with precision and the F1-score. Experimental comparisons are conducted on support vector machine (SVM) and naive Bayes (NB) classifiers. The experimental results demonstrate that the feature selection algorithms proposed in this paper improve performance across various news corpora, although the best feature selection schemes for each type of corpus are different. Further studies of the application of the improved feature selection methods in other languages and the improvement in classifiers are suggested.

Feature selection plays an important role in big data mining and pattern recognition, which includes selecting a subset of the most informative features that produces compatible results as the original entire set of features. A new similarity measure is proposed in terms of information theory, in particular joint mutual information between features with respect to class labels. Based on the similarity measure, an adaptive spectral clustering that could determine cluster number adaptively is proposed. Furthermore, we propose a new feature selection algorithm called Adaptive Spectral Clustering based on Joint Mutual Information (ASC-JMI) which can effectively and efficiently deal with both irrelevant and redundant features, and select a high-quality feature subset. The experimental results on five high-dimensional benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ASC-JMI is effective in selecting the informative features and obtains competitive classification performance.

This article describes how feature selection for learning to rank algorithms has become an interesting issue. While noisy and irrelevant features influence performance, and result in an overfitting problem in ranking systems, reducing the number of features by illuminating irrelevant and noisy features is a solution. Several studies have applied feature selection for learning to rank, which promote efficiency and effectiveness of ranking models. As the number of features and consequently the number of irrelevant and noisy features is increasing, systematic a review of Feature selection for learning to rank methods is required. In this article, a framework to examine research on feature selection for learning to rank (FSLR) is proposed. Under this framework, the authors review the most state-of-the-art methods and suggest several criteria to analyze them. FSLR offers a structured classification of current algorithms for future research to: a) properly select strategies from existing algorithms using certain criteria or b) to find ways to develop existing methodologies.

In the design of classification models, irrelevant or noisy features are often generated. In some cases, there may even be negative interactions among features. These weaknesses can degrade the performance of the models. Feature selection is a task that searches for a small subset of relevant features from the original set that generate the most efficient models possible. In addition to improving the efficiency of the models, feature selection confers other advantages, such as greater ease in the generation of the necessary data as well as clearer and more interpretable models. In the case of medical applications, feature selection may help to distinguish which characteristics, habits, and factors have the greatest impact on the onset of diseases. However, feature selection is a complex task due to the large number of possible solutions. In the last few years, methods based on different metaheuristic strategies, mainly evolutionary algorithms, have been proposed. The motivation of this work is to develop a method that outperforms previous methods, with the benefits that this implies especially in the medical field. More precisely, the present study proposes a simple method based on tabu search and multistart techniques. The proposed method was analyzed and compared to other methods by testing their performance on several medical databases. Specifically, eight databases belong to the well-known repository of the University of California in Irvine and one of our own design were used. In these computational tests, the proposed method outperformed other recent methods as gauged by various metrics and classifiers. The analyses were accompanied by statistical tests, the results of which showed that the superiority of our method is significant and therefore strengthened these conclusions. In short, the contribution of this work is the development of a method that, on the one hand, is based on different strategies than those used in recent methods, and on the other hand, improves the performance of these methods.

Feature selection plays an essential role in enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of machine learning models, particularly in the context of large-scale datasets where the dimensionality of features presents significant challenges. This research presents a novel approach to feature selection, a critical aspect of enhancing machine learning model efficiency, particularly in the context of large-scale datasets. By integrating the Flamingo Search Algorithm (FSA), Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm III (NSGA-III), and Regularised Extreme Learning Machine (RELM), the proposed method addresses limitations in existing feature selection and multi-objective optimisation algorithms. Leveraging FSA’s emulation of flamingo behaviours, the approach achieves a balance between global exploration and local exploitation, mitigating issues like premature convergence and local optima. Integration with NSGA-III enhances multi-objective optimisation capabilities, maintaining a delicate equilibrium between convergence and diversity. FSA-RELM is employed for accurate feature assessment, given its rapid learning and suitability for large datasets with multiple labels. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the proposed method’s superiority in feature selection accuracy, classification performance, and computational efficiency compared to existing approaches. This research contributes to advancing feature selection methodologies, offering a comprehensive solution for high-dimensional datasets in machine learning and data mining applications.