An adaptive dual-strategy constrained optimization-based coevolutionary optimizer for high-dimensional feature selection

Abstract

The feature subset obtained by traditional feature selection algorithms usually contains many irrelevant features and redundant features, which increases the size of the feature set and reduces classification accuracy. More importantly, these irrelevant features and redundant features may lead to local optimum. How to efficiently select the global optimal feature subset from high-dimensional data is a challenging task. To solve the problem, an adaptive dual-strategy constrained optimization-based coevolutionary optimizer for high-dimensional feature selection (ADSCO) is proposed in this paper. The contributions of this algorithm are as follows. Firstly, an adaptive dual strategy constrained optimization mechanism (ADSC) is developed. In the ADSC, the adaptive linear constraint strategy and the random constraint strategy are designed to search for the feature subsets that satisfy the constraints. This can reduce the search space of candidate solutions. Secondly, the dual population-constrained coevolutionary optimizer (CO) is developed to help the algorithm jump out of the local optimum and search for better optimal solutions to further improve the classification accuracy of ADSCO. Finally, the ablation experiments are executed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed ADSC and CO. The ADSCO algorithm is tested on 8 high-dimensional datasets and 8 low-dimensional datasets, and compared with seven typical population feature selection algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed ADSCO algorithm is superior to the 7 comparison algorithms in terms of classification accuracy and feature subset size, demonstrating its strong competitiveness in tackling high-dimensional data feature selection.