Title: Solving feature selection problem using intelligent double treatment iterative composite neighbourhood structure algorithm

Authors: Saif Kifah; Salwani Abdullah; Yahya Z. Arajy

Addresses: Data Mining and Optimisation Research Group (DMO), Centre for Artificial Intelligence Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi Selangor, Malaysia ' Data Mining and Optimisation Research Group (DMO), Centre for Artificial Intelligence Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi Selangor, Malaysia ' Data Mining and Optimisation Research Group (DMO), Centre for Artificial Intelligence Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi Selangor, Malaysia

Abstract: Attribute reduction is one of the main contributions in rough set theory (RST) that tries to discover all possible reducts by eliminating redundant attributes while maintaining the information of the problem in hand. In this paper, we propose a meta-heuristic methodology called a double treatment iterative improvement algorithm with intelligent selection of composite neighbourhood structure, to solve the attribute reduction problems and to obtain near optimal reducts. The algorithm works iteratively by only accepting an improved solution. The proposed approach has been tried on a set of 13 benchmark datasets taken from the University of California Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository in line with the state-of-the-art methods. Thirteen datasets have been chosen due to the differences in size and complexity in order to test the stability of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is able to produce competitive results for the tested datasets.

Keywords: attribute reduction; composite neighbourhood structure; CNS; iterative improvement algorithm; rough set theory; INNS-CIIS 2014; rough sets; feature selection; metaheuristics; intelligent selection; machine learning.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCVR.2017.083450

International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, 2017 Vol.7 No.3, pp.255 - 275

Received: 16 Feb 2015
Accepted: 12 Jun 2015
Published online: 31 Mar 2017 *

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