A new ensemble feature selection approach based on genetic algorithm

Abstract

In the ensemble feature selection method, if the weight adjustment is performed on each feature subset used, the ensemble effect can be significantly different; therefore, how to find the optimized weight vector is a key and challenging problem. Aiming at this optimization problem, this paper proposes an ensemble feature selection approach based on genetic algorithm (EFS-BGA). After each base feature selector generates a feature subset, the EFS-BGA method obtains the optimized weight of each feature subset through genetic algorithm, which is different from traditional genetic algorithm directly processing single features. We divide the EFS-BGA algorithm into two types. The first is a complete ensemble feature selection method; based on the first, we further propose the selective EFS-BGA model. After that, through mathematical analysis, we theoretically explain why weight adjustment is an optimization problem and how to optimize. Finally, through the comparative experiments on multiple data sets, the advantages of the EFS-BGA algorithm in this paper over the previous ensemble feature selection algorithms are explained in practice.