Relevancy contemplation in medical data analytics and ranking of feature selection algorithms

This article performs a detailed data scrutiny on a chronic kidney disease (CKD) dataset to select efficient instances and relevant features. Data relevancy is investigated using feature extraction, hybrid outlier detection, and handling of missing values. Data instances that do not influence the target are removed using data envelopment analysis to enable reduction of rows. Column reduction is achieved by ranking the attributes through feature selection methodologies, namely, extra-trees classifier, recursive feature elimination, chi-squared test, analysis of variance, and mutual information. These methodologies are ranked via Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) using weight optimization to identify the optimal features for model building from the CKD dataset to facilitate better prediction while diagnosing the severity of the disease. An efficient hybrid ensemble and novel similarity-based classifiers are built using the pruned dataset, and the results are thereafter compared with random forest, AdaBoost, naive Bayes, k-nearest neighbors, and support vector machines. The hybrid ensemble classifier yields a better prediction accuracy of 98.31% for the features selected by extra tree classifier (ETC), which is ranked as the best by TOPSIS.