A rough set approach to feature selection based on power set tree

Feature selection is viewed as an important preprocessing step for pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining. Traditional hill-climbing search approaches to feature selection have difficulties to find optimal reducts. And the current stochastic search strategies, such as GA, ACO and PSO, provide a more robust solution but at the expense of increased computational effort. It is necessary to investigate fast and effective search algorithms. Rough set theory provides a mathematical tool to discover data dependencies and reduce the number of features contained in a dataset by purely structural methods. In this paper, we define a structure called power set tree (PS-tree), which is an order tree representing the power set, and each possible reduct is mapped to a node of the tree. Then, we present a rough set approach to feature selection based on PS-tree. Two kinds of pruning rules for PS-tree are given. And two novel feature selection algorithms based on PS-tree are also given. Experiment results demonstrate that our algorithms are effective and efficient.     

Neighborhood rough set based heterogeneous feature subset selection

Feature subset selection is viewed as an important preprocessing step for pattern recognition, machine learning and data mining. Most of researches are focused on dealing with homogeneous feature selection, namely, numerical or categorical features. In this paper, we introduce a neighborhood rough set model to deal with the problem of heterogeneous feature subset selection. As the classical rough set model can just be used to evaluate categorical features, we generalize this model with neighborhood relations and introduce a neighborhood rough set model. The proposed model will degrade to the classical one if we specify the size of neighborhood zero. The neighborhood model is used to reduce numerical and categorical features by assigning different thresholds for different kinds of attributes. In this model the sizes of the neighborhood lower and upper approximations of decisions reflect the discriminating capability of feature subsets. The size of lower approximation is computed as the dependency between decision and condition attributes. We use the neighborhood dependency to evaluate the significance of a subset of heterogeneous features and construct forward feature subset selection algorithms. The proposed algorithms are compared with some classical techniques. Experimental results show that the neighborhood model based method is more flexible to deal with heterogeneous data.     

A hybrid genetic algorithm for feature subset selection in rough set theory

Rough set theory has been proven to be an effective tool to feature subset selection. Current research usually employ hill-climbing as search strategy to select feature subset. However, they are inadequate to find the optimal feature subset since no heuristic can guarantee optimality. Due to this, many researchers study stochastic methods. Since previous works of combination of genetic algorithm and rough set theory do not show competitive performance compared with some other stochastic methods, we propose a hybrid genetic algorithm for feature subset selection in this paper, called HGARSTAR. Different from previous works, HGARSTAR embeds a novel local search operation based on rough set theory to fine-tune the search. This aims to enhance GA’s intensification ability. Moreover, all candidates (i.e. feature subsets) generated in evolutionary process are enforced to include core features to accelerate convergence. To verify the proposed algorithm, experiments are performed on some standard UCI datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm.     

A hybrid PBIL-based harmony search method

The harmony search (HS) method is a popular meta-heuristic optimization algorithm, which has been extensively employed to handle various engineering problems. However, it sometimes fails to offer a satisfactory convergence performance under certain circumstances. In this paper, we propose and study a hybrid HS approach, HS–PBIL, by merging the HS together with the population-based incremental learning (PBIL). Numerical simulations demonstrate that our HS–PBIL is well capable of outperforming the regular HS method in dealing with nonlinear function optimization and a practical wind generator optimization problem.     

A rough set approach to feature selection based on ant colony optimization

Rough set theory is one of the effective methods to feature selection, which can preserve the meaning of the features. The essence of rough set approach to feature selection is to find a subset of the original features. Since finding a minimal subset of the features is a NP-hard problem, it is necessary to investigate effective and efficient heuristic algorithms. Ant colony optimization (ACO) has been successfully applied to many difficult combinatorial problems like quadratic assignment, traveling salesman, scheduling, etc. It is particularly attractive for feature selection since there is no heuristic information that can guide search to the optimal minimal subset every time. However, ants can discover the best feature combinations as they traverse the graph. In this paper, we propose a new rough set approach to feature selection based on ACO, which adopts mutual information based feature significance as heuristic information. A novel feature selection algorithm is also given. Jensen and Shen proposed a ACO-based feature selection approach which starts from a random feature. Our approach starts from the feature core, which changes the complete graph to a smaller one. To verify the efficiency of our algorithm, experiments are carried out on some standard UCI datasets. The results demonstrate that our algorithm can provide efficient solution to find a minimal subset of the features.     

A novel hybrid feature selection via Symmetrical Uncertainty ranking based local memetic search algorithm

A novel correlation based memetic framework (MA-C) which is a combination of genetic algorithm (GA) and local search (LS) using correlation based filter ranking is proposed in this paper. The local filter method used here fine-tunes the population of GA solutions by adding or deleting features based on Symmetrical Uncertainty (SU) measure. The focus here is on filter methods that are able to assess the goodness or ranking of the individual features. Empirical study of MA-C on several commonly used datasets from the large-scale Gene expression datasets indicates that it outperforms recent existing methods in the literature in terms of classification accuracy, selected feature size and efficiency. Further, we also investigate the balance between local and genetic search to maximize the search quality and efficiency of MA-C.     

A fuzzy rough set approach to hierarchical feature selection based on Hausdorff distance

Applied Intelligence - With increases in feature dimensions and the emergence of hierarchical class structures, hierarchical feature selection has become an important data preprocessing step in...     

Incremental feature selection based on rough set in dynamic incomplete data

Feature selection plays a vital role in many areas of pattern recognition and data mining. The effective computation of feature selection is important for improving the classification performance. In rough set theory, many feature selection algorithms have been proposed to process static incomplete data. However, feature values in an incomplete data set may vary dynamically in real-world applications. For such dynamic incomplete data, a classic (non-incremental) approach of feature selection is usually computationally time-consuming. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose an incremental approach for feature selection, which can accelerate the feature selection process in dynamic incomplete data. We firstly employ an incremental manner to compute the new positive region when feature values with respect to an object set vary dynamically. Based on the calculated positive region, two efficient incremental feature selection algorithms are developed respectively for single object and multiple objects with varying feature values. Then we conduct a series of experiments with 12 UCI real data sets to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms compare favorably with that of applying the existing non-incremental methods.     

A new local search based hybrid genetic algorithm for feature selection

This paper presents a new hybrid genetic algorithm (HGA) for feature selection (FS), called as HGAFS. The vital aspect of this algorithm is the selection of salient feature subset within a reduced size. HGAFS incorporates a new local search operation that is devised and embedded in HGA to fine-tune the search in FS process. The local search technique works on basis of the distinct and informative nature of input features that is computed by their correlation information. The aim is to guide the search process so that the newly generated offsprings can be adjusted by the less correlated (distinct) features consisting of general and special characteristics of a given dataset. Thus, the proposed HGAFS receives the reduced redundancy of information among the selected features. On the other hand, HGAFS emphasizes on selecting a subset of salient features with reduced number using a subset size determination scheme. We have tested our HGAFS on 11 real-world classification datasets having dimensions varying from 8 to 7129. The performances of HGAFS have been compared with the results of other existing ten well-known FS algorithms. It is found that, HGAFS produces consistently better performances on selecting the subsets of salient features with resulting better classification accuracies.     

A novel hybrid feature selection method for microarray data analysis

Recently, many methods have been proposed for microarray data analysis. One of the challenges for microarray applications is to select a proper number of the most relevant genes for data analysis. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid method for feature selection in microarray data analysis. This method first uses a genetic algorithm with dynamic parameter setting (GADP) to generate a number of subsets of genes and to rank the genes according to their occurrence frequencies in the gene subsets. Then, this method uses the χ²-test for homogeneity to select a proper number of the top-ranked genes for data analysis. We use the support vector machine (SVM) to verify the efficiency of the selected genes. Six different microarray datasets are used to compare the performance of the GADP method with the existing methods. The experimental results show that the GADP method is better than the existing methods in terms of the number of selected genes and the prediction accuracy.     

自适应和声搜索算法及在粗糙集属性约简中的应用

针对改进和声搜索算法（ＩＨＳ）存在的不足,提出了自适应和声搜索算法（ＡＨＳ）．该算法利用和声库中变量函数的最大差值来调节ＰＡＲ 和ｂｗ,从而提高了对多维问题的搜索效率．利用５个标准测试函数对ＡＨＳ算法进行测试,并应用于粗糙集的属性约简中．仿真结果表明了该算法的有效性和实用性．     

Supervised hybrid feature selection based on PSO and rough sets for medical diagnosis

Medical datasets are often classified by a large number of disease measurements and a relatively small number of patient records. All these measurements (features) are not important or irrelevant/noisy. These features may be especially harmful in the case of relatively small training sets, where this irrelevancy and redundancy is harder to evaluate. On the other hand, this extreme number of features carries the problem of memory usage in order to represent the dataset. Feature Selection (FS) is a solution that involves finding a subset of prominent features to improve predictive accuracy and to remove the redundant features. Thus, the learning model receives a concise structure without forfeiting the predictive accuracy built by using only the selected prominent features. Therefore, nowadays, FS is an essential part of knowledge discovery. In this study, new supervised feature selection methods based on hybridization of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), PSO based Relative Reduct (PSO-RR) and PSO based Quick Reduct (PSO-QR) are presented for the diseases diagnosis. The experimental result on several standard medical datasets proves the efficiency of the proposed technique as well as enhancements over the existing feature selection techniques.     

A novel feature selection method based on normalized mutual information

In this paper, a novel feature selection method based on the normalization of the well-known mutual information measurement is presented. Our method is derived from an existing approach, the max-relevance and min-redundancy (mRMR) approach. We, however, propose to normalize the mutual information used in the method so that the domination of the relevance or of the redundancy can be eliminated. We borrow some commonly used recognition models including Support Vector Machine (SVM), k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN), and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to compare our algorithm with the original (mRMR) and a recently improved version of the mRMR, the Normalized Mutual Information Feature Selection (NMIFS) algorithm. To avoid data-specific statements, we conduct our classification experiments using various datasets from the UCI machine learning repository. The results confirm that our feature selection method is more robust than the others with regard to classification accuracy.     

Online multi-label stream feature selection based on neighborhood rough set with missing labels

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Multi-label feature selection has been essential in many big data applications and plays a significant role in processing high-dimensional data. However, the...     

基于粗糙集的故障诊断特征提取

故障的特征提取对于进行准确可靠的诊断非常重要。而实际的故障诊断数据样本的分类边界常常是不确定的,并且故障与征兆之间的关系往往也是不确定的。粗糙集理论是处理模糊和不确定性问题的新的数学工具。论文将粗糙集理论引入到故障诊断特征提取,提出了一种基于粗糙集的故障诊断特征提取方法。并通过两个故障诊断实例对该方法进行了验证。结果表明:在有效地保持故障诊断分类结果的情况下,该方法可以提取出最能反映故障的特征,从而为粗糙集在故障诊断中的深入应用打下了基础。     

Enhancing evolutionary instance selection algorithms by means of fuzzy rough set based feature selection

In recent years, fuzzy rough set theory has emerged as a suitable tool for performing feature selection. Fuzzy rough feature selection enables us to analyze the discernibility of the attributes, highlighting the most attractive features in the construction of classifiers. However, its results can be enhanced even more if other data reduction techniques, such as instance selection, are considered.In this work, a hybrid evolutionary algorithm for data reduction, using both instance and feature selection, is presented. A global process of instance selection, carried out by a steady-state genetic algorithm, is combined with a fuzzy rough set based feature selection process, which searches for the most interesting features to enhance both the evolutionary search process and the final preprocessed data set. The experimental study, the results of which have been contrasted through nonparametric statistical tests, shows that our proposal obtains high reduction rates on training sets which greatly enhance the behavior of the nearest neighbor classifier.     

A novel hybrid algorithm for feature selection

Feature selection is an important filtering method for data analysis, pattern classification, data mining, and so on. Feature selection reduces the number of features by removing irrelevant and redundant data. In this paper, we propose a hybrid filter–wrapper feature subset selection algorithm called the maximum Spearman minimum covariance cuckoo search (MSMCCS). First, based on Spearman and covariance, a filter algorithm is proposed called maximum Spearman minimum covariance (MSMC). Second, three parameters are proposed in MSMC to adjust the weights of the correlation and redundancy, improve the relevance of feature subsets, and reduce the redundancy. Third, in the improved cuckoo search algorithm, a weighted combination strategy is used to select candidate feature subsets, a crossover mutation concept is used to adjust the candidate feature subsets, and finally, the filtered features are selected into optimal feature subsets. Therefore, the MSMCCS combines the efficiency of filters with the greater accuracy of wrappers. Experimental results on eight common data sets from the University of California at Irvine Machine Learning Repository showed that the MSMCCS algorithm had better classification accuracy than the seven wrapper methods, the one filter method, and the two hybrid methods. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm achieved preferable performance on the Wilcoxon signed-rank test and the sensitivity–specificity test.     

Rough set and scatter search metaheuristic based feature selection for credit scoring

As the credit industry has been growing rapidly, credit scoring models have been widely used by the financial industry during this time to improve cash flow and credit collections. However, a large amount of redundant information and features are involved in the credit dataset, which leads to lower accuracy and higher complexity of the credit scoring model. So, effective feature selection methods are necessary for credit dataset with huge number of features. In this paper, a novel approach, called RSFS, to feature selection based on rough set and scatter search is proposed. In RSFS, conditional entropy is regarded as the heuristic to search the optimal solutions. Two credit datasets in UCI database are selected to demonstrate the competitive performance of RSFS consisted in three credit models including neural network model, J48 decision tree and Logistic regression. The experimental result shows that RSFS has a superior performance in saving the computational costs and improving classification accuracy compared with the base classification methods.     

A novel believable rough set approach for supplier selection

We consider the issue of supplier selection by using rule-based methodology. Supplier Selection (SS) is an important activity in Logistics and Supply Chain Management in today’s global market. It is one of major applications of Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) that concerns about preference-related decision information. The rule-based methodology is proven of its effectiveness in handling preference information and performs well in sorting or ranking alternatives. However, how to utilize them in SS still remains open for more studies. In this paper, we propose a novel Believable Rough Set Approach (BRSA). This approach performs the complete problem-solving procedures including (1) criteria analysis, (2) rough approximation, (3) decision rule induction, and (4) a scheme for rule application. Unlike other rule-based solutions that just extract certain information, the proposed solution additionally extracts valuable uncertain information for rule induction. Due to such mechanism, BRSA outperforms other solutions in evaluation of suppliers. A detailed empirical study is provided for demonstration of decision-making procedures and multiple comparisons with other proposals.     

On the use of evolutionary feature selection for improving fuzzy rough set based prototype selection

The k-nearest neighbors classifier is a widely used classification method that has proven to be very effective in supervised learning tasks. In this paper, a fuzzy rough set method for prototype selection, focused on optimizing the behavior of this classifier, is presented. The hybridization with an evolutionary feature selection method is considered to further improve its performance, obtaining a competent data reduction algorithm for the 1-nearest neighbors classifier. This hybridization is performed in the training phase, by using the solution of each preprocessing technique as the starting condition of the other one, within a cycle. The results of the experimental study, which have been contrasted through nonparametric statistical tests, show that the new hybrid approach obtains very promising results with respect to classification accuracy and reduction of the size of the training set.