gMLC: a multi-label feature selection framework for graph classification

Graph classification has been showing critical importance in a wide variety of applications, e.g. drug activity predictions and toxicology analysis. Current research on graph classification focuses on single-label settings. However, in many applications, each graph data can be assigned with a set of multiple labels simultaneously. Extracting good features using multiple labels of the graphs becomes an important step before graph classification. In this paper, we study the problem of multi-label feature selection for graph classification and propose a novel solution, called gMLC, to efficiently search for optimal subgraph features for graph objects with multiple labels. Different from existing feature selection methods in vector spaces that assume the feature set is given, we perform multi-label feature selection for graph data in a progressive way together with the subgraph feature mining process. We derive an evaluation criterion to estimate the dependence between subgraph features and multiple labels of graphs. Then, a branch-and-bound algorithm is proposed to efficiently search for optimal subgraph features by judiciously pruning the subgraph search space using multiple labels. Empirical studies demonstrate that our feature selection approach can effectively boost multi-label graph classification performances and is more efficient by pruning the subgraph search space using multiple labels.     

Dynamic graph learning for spectral feature selection

Previous spectral feature selection methods generate the similarity graph via ignoring the negative effect of noise and redundancy of the original feature space, and ignoring the association between graph matrix learning and feature selection, so that easily producing suboptimal results. To address these issues, this paper joints graph learning and feature selection in a framework to obtain optimal selected performance. More specifically, we use the least square loss function and an ? _2,1-norm regularization to remove the effect of noisy and redundancy features, and use the resulting local correlations among the features to dynamically learn a graph matrix from a low-dimensional space of original data. Experimental results on real data sets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art feature selection methods for classification tasks.

     

An adaptive memetic algorithm for feature selection using proximity graphs

We propose a multivariate feature selection method that uses proximity graphs for assessing the quality of feature subsets. Initially, a complete graph is built, where nodes are the samples, and edge weights are calculated considering only the selected features. Next, a proximity graph is constructed on the basis of these weights and different fitness functions, calculated over the proximity graph, to evaluate the quality of the selected feature set. We propose an iterative methodology on the basis of a memetic algorithm for exploring the space of possible feature subsets aimed at maximizing a quality score. We designed multiple local search strategies, and we used an adaptive strategy for automatic balancing between the global and local search components of the memetic algorithm. The computational experiments were carried out using four well‐known data sets. We investigate the suitability of three different proximity graphs (minimum spanning tree, k‐nearest neighbors, and relative neighborhood graph) for the proposed approach. The selected features have been evaluated using a total of 49 classification methods from an open‐source data mining and machine learning package (WEKA). The computational results show that the proposed adaptive memetic algorithm can perform better than traditional genetic algorithms in finding more useful feature sets. Finally, we establish the competitiveness of our approach by comparing it with other well‐known feature selection methods.     

多目标优化在特征选择子集评价中的应用

特征选择是处理高维大数据常用的降维手段,但其中牵涉到的多个彼此冲突的特征子集评价目标难以平衡。为综合考虑特征选择中多种子集评价方式间的折中,优化子集性能,提出一种基于子集评价多目标优化的特征选择框架,并重点对多目标粒子群优化（MOPSO）在特征子集评价中的应用进行了研究。该框架分别根据子集的稀疏度、分类能力和信息损失度设计多目标优化函数,继而基于多目标优化算法进行特征权值向量寻优,并通过权值向量Pareto解集膝点选取确定最优向量,最终实现基于权值向量排序的特征选择。设计实验对比了基于多目标粒子群优化算法的特征选择（FS_MOPSO）与四种经典方法的性能,多个数据集上的结果表明,FS_MOPSO在低维空间表现出更高的分类精度,并保证了更少的信息损失。     

基于混合ABC和CRO的高维特征选择方法

高维数据集包含了成千上万可用于数据分析和预测的特征，然而这些数据集存在许多不相关或冗余特征，影响了数据分析和预测的准确性。现有分类技术难以准确地识别最佳特征子集。针对该问题，提出了一种基于wrapper模式的特征选择方法AB-CRO，该方法结合了人工蜂群算法（ABC）和改进的化学反应算法（CRO）的优点进行特征选择。针对迭代过程中较优的个体可能在化学反应过程中被消耗掉的现象，适当地加入精英策略来保持种群的优良性。实验结果表明，AB-CRO算法在最佳特征子集的识别和分类精度方面相对于基准算法ABC，CRO以及基于GA，PSO和混合蛙跳算法都所有改进。     

图Laplacian和自训练用于高光谱数据半监督波段选择

波段选择是数据降维的有效手段,但有限的标记样本影响了监督波段选择的性能。提出一种利用图Laplacian和自训练策略实现半监督波段选择的方法。该方法首先定义基于图的半监督特征评分准则以产生初始波段子集,接着在该子集基础上进行分类,采用自训练策略将部分可信度较高的非标记样本扩展至标记样本集合,再用特征评分准则对波段子集进行更新。重复该过程,获得最终波段子集。高光谱波段选择与分类实验比较了多种非监督、监督和半监督方法,实验结果表明所提算法能选择出更好的波段子集。     

Ordinal-based and frequency-based integration of feature selection methods for sentiment analysis

Feature subset selection with the aim of reducing dependency of feature selection techniques and obtaining a high-quality minimal feature subset from a real-world domain is the main task of this research. For this end, firstly, two types of feature representation are presented for feature sets, namely unigram-based and part-of-speech based feature sets. Secondly, five methods of feature ranking are employed for creating feature vectors. Finally, we propose two methods for the integration feature vectors and feature subsets. An ordinal-based integration of different feature vectors (OIFV) is proposed in order to obtain a new feature vector. The new feature vector depends on the order of features in the old vectors. A frequency-based integration of different feature subsets (FIFS) with most effective features, which are obtained from a hybrid filter and wrapper methods in the feature selection task, is then proposed. In addition, four well-known text classification algorithms are employed as classifiers in the wrapper method for the selection of the feature subsets. A wide range of comparative experiments on five widely-used datasets in sentiment analysis were carried out. The experiments demonstrate that proposed methods can effectively improve the performance of sentiment classification. These results also show that proposed part-of-speech patterns are more effective in their classification accuracy compared to unigram-based features.     

A feature cluster taxonomy based feature selection technique

Feature subset selection is basically an optimization problem for choosing the most important features from various alternatives in order to facilitate classification or mining problems. Though lots of algorithms have been developed so far, none is considered to be the best for all situations and researchers are still trying to come up with better solutions. In this work, a flexible and user-guided feature subset selection algorithm, named as FCTFS (Feature Cluster Taxonomy based Feature Selection) has been proposed for selecting suitable feature subset from a large feature set. The proposed algorithm falls under the genre of clustering based feature selection techniques in which features are initially clustered according to their intrinsic characteristics following the filter approach. In the second step the most suitable feature is selected from each cluster to form the final subset following a wrapper approach. The two stage hybrid process lowers the computational cost of subset selection, especially for large feature data sets. One of the main novelty of the proposed approach lies in the process of determining optimal number of feature clusters. Unlike currently available methods, which mostly employ a trial and error approach, the proposed method characterises and quantifies the feature clusters according to the quality of the features inside the clusters and defines a taxonomy of the feature clusters. The selection of individual features from a feature cluster can be done judiciously considering both the relevancy and redundancy according to user’s intention and requirement. The algorithm has been verified by simulation experiments with different bench mark data set containing features ranging from 10 to more than 800 and compared with other currently used feature selection algorithms. The simulation results prove the superiority of our proposal in terms of model performance, flexibility of use in practical problems and extendibility to large feature sets. Though the current proposal is verified in the domain of unsupervised classification, it can be easily used in case of supervised classification.     

Probabilistic frequent subtrees for efficient graph classification and retrieval

Frequent subgraphs proved to be powerful features for graph classification and prediction tasks. Their practical use is, however, limited by the computational intractability of pattern enumeration and that of graph embedding into frequent subgraph feature spaces. We propose a simple probabilistic technique that resolves both limitations. In particular, we restrict the pattern language to trees and relax the demand on the completeness of the mining algorithm, as well as on the correctness of the pattern matching operator by replacing transaction and query graphs with small random samples of their spanning trees. In this way we consider only a random subset of frequent subtrees, called probabilistic frequent subtrees, that can be enumerated efficiently. Our extensive empirical evaluation on artificial and benchmark molecular graph datasets shows that probabilistic frequent subtrees can be listed in practically feasible time and that their predictive and retrieval performance is very close even to those of complete sets of frequent subgraphs. We also present different fast techniques for computing the embedding of unseen graphs into (probabilistic frequent) subtree feature spaces. These algorithms utilize the partial order on tree patterns induced by subgraph isomorphism and, as we show empirically, require much less evaluations of subtree isomorphism than the standard brute-force algorithm. We also consider partial embeddings, i.e., when only a part of the feature vector has to be calculated. In particular, we propose a highly effective practical algorithm that significantly reduces the number of pattern matching evaluations required by the classical min-hashing algorithm approximating Jaccard-similarities.     

基于近似Markov Blanket和动态互信息的特征选择算法

针对大量无关和冗余特征的存在可能降低分类器性能的问题,提出了一种基于近似Markov Blanket和动态互信息的特征选择算法。该算法利用互信息作为特征相关性的度量准则,并在未识别的样本上对互信息进行动态估值,利用近似Markov Blanket原理准确地去除冗余特征,从而获得远小于原始特征规模的特征子集。通过仿真试验证明了该算法的有效性。以支持向量机为分类器,在公共数据集UCI上进行了试验,并与DMIFS和ReliefF算法进行了对比。试验结果证明,该算法选取的特征子集与原始特征子集相比,以远小于原始特征规模的特征子集获得了高于或接近于原始特征集合的分类结果。     

Feature subset selection and feature ranking for multivariate time series

Feature subset selection (FSS) is a known technique to preprocess the data before performing any data mining tasks, e.g., classification and clustering. FSS provides both cost-effective predictors and a better understanding of the underlying process that generated the data. We propose a family of novel unsupervised methods for feature subset selection from multivariate time series (MTS) based on common principal component analysis, termed CLeVer. Traditional FSS techniques, such as recursive feature elimination (RFE) and Fisher criterion (FC), have been applied to MTS data sets, e.g., brain computer interface (BCI) data sets. However, these techniques may lose the correlation information among features, while our proposed techniques utilize the properties of the principal component analysis to retain that information. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our selected subset of features, we employ classification as the target data mining task. Our exhaustive experiments show that CLeVer outperforms RFE, FC, and random selection by up to a factor of two in terms of the classification accuracy, while taking up to 2 orders of magnitude less processing time than RFE and FC.     

Automatic 3D Shape Co-Segmentation Using Spectral Graph Method

Co-analyzing a set of 3D shapes is a challenging task considering a large geometrical variability of the shapes. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new automatic 3D shape co-segmentation algorithm by using spectral graph method.Our method firstly represents input shapes as a set of weighted graphs and extracts multiple geometric features to measure the similarities of faces in each individual shape.Secondly all graphs are embedded into the spectral domain to find meaningful correspondences across the set.After that we build a joint weighted matrix for the graph set and then apply normalized cut criterion to find optimal co-segmentation of the input shapes.Finally we evaluate our approach on different categories of 3D shapes, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method can accurately co-segment a wide variety of shapes, which may have different poses and significant topology changes.     

Unsupervised feature selection with graph learning via low-rank constraint

Feature selection is one of the most important machine learning procedure, and it has been successfully applied to make a preprocessing before using classification and clustering methods. High-dimensional features often appear in big data, and it’s characters block data processing. So spectral feature selection algorithms have been increasing attention by researchers. However, most feature selection methods, they consider these tasks as two steps, learn similarity matrix from original feature space (may be include redundancy for all features), and then conduct data clustering. Due to these limitations, they do not get good performance on classification and clustering tasks in big data processing applications. To address this problem, we propose an Unsupervised Feature Selection method with graph learning framework, which can reduce the redundancy features influence and utilize a low-rank constraint on the weight matrix simultaneously. More importantly, we design a new objective function to handle this problem. We evaluate our approach by six benchmark datasets. And all empirical classification results show that our new approach outperforms state-of-the-art feature selection approaches.     

A genetic algorithm-based method for feature subset selection

As a commonly used technique in data preprocessing, feature selection selects a subset of informative attributes or variables to build models describing data. By removing redundant and irrelevant or noise features, feature selection can improve the predictive accuracy and the comprehensibility of the predictors or classifiers. Many feature selection algorithms with different selection criteria has been introduced by researchers. However, it is discovered that no single criterion is best for all applications. In this paper, we propose a framework based on a genetic algorithm (GA) for feature subset selection that combines various existing feature selection methods. The advantages of this approach include the ability to accommodate multiple feature selection criteria and find small subsets of features that perform well for a particular inductive learning algorithm of interest to build the classifier. We conducted experiments using three data sets and three existing feature selection methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach is a robust and effective approach to find subsets of features with higher classification accuracy and/or smaller size compared to each individual feature selection algorithm.     

A user parameter-free approach for mining robust sequential classification rules

Recent years have witnessed extensive studies of graph classification due to the rapid increase in applications involving structural data and complex relationships. To support graph classification, all existing methods require that training graphs should be relevant (or belong) to the target class, but cannot integrate graphs irrelevant to the class of interest into the learning process. In this paper, we study a new universum graph classification framework which leverages additional “non-example” graphs to help improve the graph classification accuracy. We argue that although universum graphs do not belong to the target class, they may contain meaningful structure patterns to help enrich the feature space for graph representation and classification. To support universum graph classification, we propose a mathematical programming algorithm, ugBoost, which integrates discriminative subgraph selection and margin maximization into a unified framework to fully exploit the universum. Because informative subgraph exploration in a universum setting requires the search of a large space, we derive an upper bound discriminative score for each subgraph and employ a branch-and-bound scheme to prune the search space. By using the explored subgraphs, our graph classification model intends to maximize the margin between positive and negative graphs and minimize the loss on the universum graph examples simultaneously. The subgraph exploration and the learning are integrated and performed iteratively so that each can be beneficial to the other. Experimental results and comparisons on real-world dataset demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.     

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.     

Impact of error estimation on feature selection

Given a large set of potential features, it is usually necessary to find a small subset with which to classify. The task of finding an optimal feature set is inherently combinatoric and therefore suboptimal algorithms are typically used to find feature sets. If feature selection is based directly on classification error, then a feature-selection algorithm must base its decision on error estimates. This paper addresses the impact of error estimation on feature selection using two performance measures: comparison of the true error of the optimal feature set with the true error of the feature set found by a feature-selection algorithm, and the number of features among the truly optimal feature set that appear in the feature set found by the algorithm. The study considers seven error estimators applied to three standard suboptimal feature-selection algorithms and exhaustive search, and it considers three different feature-label model distributions. It draws two conclusions for the cases considered: (1) depending on the sample size and the classification rule, feature-selection algorithms can produce feature sets whose corresponding classifiers possess errors far in excess of the classifier corresponding to the optimal feature set; and (2) for small samples, differences in performances among the feature-selection algorithms are less significant than performance differences among the error estimators used to implement the algorithms. Moreover, keeping in mind that results depend on the particular classifier-distribution pair, for the error estimators considered in this study, bootstrap and bolstered resubstitution usually outperform cross-validation, and bolstered resubstitution usually performs as well as or better than bootstrap.     

Wrapper–Filter Feature Selection Algorithm Using a Memetic Framework

This correspondence presents a novel hybrid wrapper and filter feature selection algorithm for a classification problem using a memetic framework. It incorporates a filter ranking method in the traditional genetic algorithm to improve classification performance and accelerate the search in identifying the core feature subsets. Particularly, the method adds or deletes a feature from a candidate feature subset based on the univariate feature ranking information. This empirical study on commonly used data sets from the University of California, Irvine repository and microarray data sets shows that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of classification accuracy, number of selected features, and computational efficiency. Furthermore, we investigate several major issues of memetic algorithm (MA) to identify a good balance between local search and genetic search so as to maximize search quality and efficiency in the hybrid filter and wrapper MA     

Selecting salient features for classification based on neural network committees

Aggregating outputs of multiple classifiers into a committee decision is one of the most important techniques for improving classification accuracy. The issue of selecting an optimal subset of relevant features plays also an important role in successful design of a pattern recognition system. In this paper, we present a neural network based approach for identifying salient features for classification in neural network committees. Feature selection is based on two criteria, namely the reaction of the cross-validation data set classification error due to the removal of the individual features and the diversity of neural networks comprising the committee. The algorithm developed removed a large number of features from the original data sets without reducing the classification accuracy of the committees. The accuracy of the committees utilizing the reduced feature sets was higher than those exploiting all the original features.     

A novel approach to feature extraction from classification models based on information gene pairs

Various microarray experiments are now done in many laboratories, resulting in the rapid accumulation of microarray data in public repositories. One of the major challenges of analyzing microarray data is how to extract and select efficient features from it for accurate cancer classification. Here we introduce a new feature extraction and selection method based on information gene pairs that have significant change in different tissue samples. Experimental results on five public microarray data sets demonstrate that the feature subset selected by the proposed method performs well and achieves higher classification accuracy on several classifiers. We perform extensive experimental comparison of the features selected by the proposed method and features selected by other methods using different evaluation methods and classifiers. The results confirm that the proposed method performs as well as other methods on acute lymphoblastic-acute myeloid leukemia, adenocarcinoma and breast cancer data sets using a fewer information genes and leads to significant improvement of classification accuracy on colon and diffuse large B cell lymphoma cancer data sets.