Feature Selection for Vocal Segmentation Using Social Emotional Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

Feature selection is an important task in many applications of pattern recognition and machine learning areas. It involves in reducing the number of features required in describing the large set of data. Many practical problems often have a large number of features in the data sets, but not all of them are useful for the pattern recognition algorithms such as classification. Irrelevant, and redundant features may even reduce the performance. Feature selection aims tochoose a small set of relevant features to achieve the same or even better performance of the classification algorithm. However, it is a challenging task to choose the best subset of features due to the large search space. It is considered as an optimization problem which tries to select the best subset of features from the complex search space that improves the performance of the algorithm. A binary version of the Social Emotional Optimization Algorithm (BSEOA) is proposed for feature selection in classification problems. The algorithm is tested on benchmark datasets for the classification using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the classifier. Also, the algorithm is used for selecting the features which can be used for the vocal segmentation of the collected songs. The vocal segmentation problem is considered as the classification of the vocal and nonvocal parts of the song. The experimental results show that the proposed binary SEOA is efficient in improving the classification accuracy by selecting an optimum set of features.