Consistency approximation: Incremental feature selection based on fuzzy rough set theory

Abstract

Fuzzy Rough Set Theory (FRST)-based feature selection has been widely used as a preprocessing step to handle dynamic and large datasets. However, large-scale or high-dimensional datasets remain intractable for FRST-based feature selection approaches due to high space complexity and unsatisfactory classification performance. To overcome these challenges, we propose a Consistency Approximation (CA)-based framework for incremental feature selection. By exploring CA, we introduce a novel significance measure and a tri-accelerator. The CA-based significance measure provides a mechanism for each sample in the universe to keep members with different class labels within its fuzzy neighbourhood as far as possible, while keeping members with the same label as close as possible. Furthermore, our tri-accelerator reduces the search space and decreases the computational space with a theoretical lower bound. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm compared to state-of-the-art methods on efficiency and classification accuracy, especially for large-scale and high-dimensional datasets.