An information-theoretic graph-based approach for feature selection

Abstract

Feature selection is a critical research problem in data science. The need for feature selection has become more critical with the advent of high-dimensional data sets especially related to text, image and micro-array data. In this paper, a graph-theoretic approach with step-by-step visualization is proposed in the context of supervised feature selection. Mutual information criterion is used to evaluate the relevance of the features with respect to the class. A graph-based representation of the input data set, named as feature information map (FIM) is created, highlighting the vertices representing the less informative features. Amongst the more informative features, the inter-feature similarity is measured to draw edges between features having high similarity. At the end, minimal vertex cover is applied on the connected vertices to identify a subset of features potentially having less similarity among each other. Results of the experiments conducted with standard data sets show that the proposed method gives better results than the competing algorithms for most of the data sets. The proposed algorithm also has a novel contribution of rendering a visualization of features in terms of relevance and redundancy.