Elitism based Multi-Objective Differential Evolution for feature selection: A filter approach with an efficient redundancy measure

Abstract

The real world data are complex in nature and addition to that a large number of features add more value to the complexity. However, the features associated with the data may be redundant and erroneous in nature. To deal with such type of features, feature selection plays a vital role in computational learning. The reduction in the dimensionality of the dataset not only reduces the computational time required for classification but also enhances the classification accuracy by removing the misleading features. This paper presents a Filter Approach using Elitism based Multi-objective Differential Evolution algorithm for feature selection (FAEMODE) and the novelty lies in the objective formulation, where both linear and nonlinear dependency among features have been considered to handle the redundant and unwanted features of a dataset. Finally, the selected feature subsets of 23 benchmark datasets are tested using 10-fold cross validation with four well-known classifiers to endorse the result. A comparative analysis of the proposed approach with seven filter approaches and two conventional as well as three metaheuristic based wrapper approaches have been carried out for validation. The result reveals that the proposed approach can be considered as a powerful filter method for feature selection in various fields. Keywords: Multi-objective, Feature selection, Differential Evolution, Filter approach, Correlation coefficient, Mutual information