Title
An Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization Framework Of Discretization-Based Feature Selection For Classification
Abstract
Feature selection (FS) aims to identify the most relevant and non-redundant feature subset for improving the classification accuracy, which is regarded as a NP-hard problem. Some heuristic methods, such as particle swarm optimization (PSO) have achieved great success, however, with the increase of feature quantity, the solution space is too large, resulting in lower search efficiency. Recent discretization-based FS methods map the search of feature domain into cut-point domain, which shrinks the solution space and improve the performances significantly. In this paper, considering the conflicts between different objectives, we proposed an evolutionary multi-objective optimization framework for discretization-based FS. To obtain the Pareto solutions, a flexible cut-point PSO (FCPSO) which can select an arbitrary number of cut-points for discretization is introduced to help better explore the relevant features. In FCPSO, a particle update and a novel adaptive mutation operator are alternatively used to effectively find the relevant features and remove the redundant features. At last, to select the best feature subset, a Pareto ensemble method is designed to generate a number of feasible solutions based on Pareto set followed by a hierarchical solution selection process. We implemented the proposed framework by using three representative multi-objective evolutionary algorithms and compared them with some state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results on ten benchmark microarray gene datasets demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms other methods in terms of test classification accuracy with a competitive size of feature subset.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.swevo.2020.100770
SWARM AND EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Feature selection, Particle swarm optimization, Evolutionary multi-objective algorithms, Discretization, Pareto ensemble
Journal
60
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2210-6502
2
0.36
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yu Zhou1584.86
Junhao Kang220.36
Sam Kwong34590315.78
Wang Xu4282.75
Qingfu Zhang57634255.05