Constructive Lazy Wolf Search Algorithm for Feature Selection in Classification

Abstract

Data mining integrates statistical analysis, machine learning and database technology to extract hidden patterns and relationships from data. The presence of irrelevant, redundant and inconsistent attributes in the data ushers poor classification accuracy. In this paper, a novel bio-inspired heuristic swarm optimization algorithm for feature selection, namely Constructive Lazy Wolf Search Algorithm is proposed based on the backbone of the Wolf Search Algorithm. It is based on the behavior of the real wolves, which search for their food and consequently survive the attacks of the threats by avoiding them. Based on the study conducted on the behavior of wolves two natural factors, namely laziness and health are introduced for attaining highest efficiency. Restricting and controlling the wolves’ behavior by allowing only healthy and constructive lazy wolves to take part in the search reduces the search time and complexity required to search for the best fitness. The proposed algorithm is then applied on a prisoner dataset for crime propensity prediction along with a few benchmark datasets to prove the stability in the improved performance compared with other bio-inspired optimization algorithms. The accuracy achieved by fine-tuning the proposed algorithm was 98.19% providing accurate crime prevention.