Evolutionary feature selection based on hybrid bald eagle search and particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Feature selection is a complicated multi-objective optimization problem with aims at reaching to the best subset of features while remaining a high accuracy in the field of machine learning, which is considered to be a difficult task. In this paper, we design a fitness function to jointly optimize the classification accuracy and the selected features in the linear weighting manner. Then, we propose two hybrid meta-heuristic methods which are the hybrid basic bald eagle search-particle swarm optimization (HBBP) and hybrid chaos-based bald eagle search-particle swarm optimization (HCBP) that alleviate the drawbacks of bald eagle search (BES) by utilizing the advantages of particle swarm optimization (PSO) to efficiently optimize the designed fitness function. Specifically, HBBP is proposed to overcome the disadvantages of the originals (i.e., BES and PSO) and HCBP is proposed to further improve the performance of HBBP. Moreover, a binary optimization is utilized to effectively transfer the solution space from continuous to binary. To evaluate the effectiveness, 17 well-known data sets from the UCI repository are employed as well as a set of well-established algorithms from the literature are adopted to jointly confirm the effectiveness of the proposed methods in terms of fitness value, classification accuracy, computational time and selected features. The results support the superiority of the proposed hybrid methods against the basic optimizers and the comparative algorithms on the most tested data sets.