An efficient ant colony optimization approach to attribute reduction in rough set theory

Abstract

Attribute reduction in rough set theory is an important feature selection method. Since attribute reduction is an NP-hard problem, it is necessary to investigate fast and effective approximate algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a new approach based on ant colony optimization (ACO) for attribute reduction. To verify the proposed algorithm, numerical experiments are carried out on thirteen small or medium-sized datasets and three gene expression datasets. The results demonstrate that this algorithm can provide competitive solutions efficiently.