A Binary Superior Tracking Artificial Bee Colony with Dynamic Cauchy Mutation for Feature Selection

Abstract

This paper aims to propose an improved learning algorithm for feature selection, termed as binary superior tracking artificial bee colony with dynamic Cauchy mutation (BSTABC-DCM). To enhance exploitation capacity, a binary learning strategy is proposed to enable each bee to learn from the superior individuals in each dimension. A dynamic Cauchy mutation is introduced to diversify the population distribution. Ten datasets from UCI repository are adopted as test problems, and the average results of cross-validation of BSTABC-DCM are compared with other seven popular swarm intelligence metaheuristics. Experimental results demonstrate that BSTABC-DCM could obtain the optimal classification accuracy and select the best representative features for the UCI problems.