Beam-Influenced Attribute Selector for Producing Stable Reduct

Abstract

Attribute reduction is a critical topic in the field of rough set theory. Currently, to further enhance the stability of the derived reduct, various attribute selectors are designed based on the framework of ensemble selectors. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that some limitations are concealed in these selectors: (1) rely heavily on the distribution of samples; (2) rely heavily on the optimal attribute. To generate the reduct with higher stability, a novel beam-influenced selector (BIS) is designed based on the strategies of random partition and beam. The scientific novelty of our selector can be divided into two aspects: (1) randomly partition samples without considering the distribution of samples; (2) beam-based selections of features can save the selector from the dependency of the optimal attribute. Comprehensive experiments using 16 UCI data sets show the following: (1) the stability of the derived reducts may be significantly enhanced by using our selector; (2) the reducts generated based on the proposed selector can provide competent performance in classification tasks.

Keywords

• attribute reduction
• random partition
• rough set
• stability