Auto-UFSTool: An Automatic Unsupervised Feature Selection Toolbox for MATLAB

Abstract

Various data analysis research has recently become necessary in to find and select relevant features without class labels using Unsupervised Feature Selection (UFS) approaches. Despite the fact that several open-source toolboxes provide feature selection techniques to reduce redundant features, data dimensionality, and computation costs, these approaches require programming knowledge, which limits their popularity and has not adequately addressed unlabeled real-world data. Automatic UFS Toolbox (Auto-UFSTool) for MATLAB, proposed in this study, is a user-friendly and fully-automatic toolbox that utilizes several UFS approaches from the most recent research. It is a collection of 25 robust UFS approaches, most of which were developed within the last five years. Therefore, a clear and systematic comparison of competing methods is feasible without requiring a single line of code. Even users without any previous programming experience may utilize the actual implementation by the Graphical User Interface (GUI). It also provides the opportunity to evaluate the feature selection results and generate graphs that facilitate the comparison of subsets of varying sizes. It is freely accessible in the MATLAB File Exchange repository and includes scripts and source code for each technique. The link to this toolbox is freely available to the general public on: bit.ly/AutoUFSTool

Keywords

• unsupervised feature selection
• matlab
• automatic toolbox
• dimension reduction
• unsupervised learning