Feature selection using bare-bones particle swarm optimization with mutual information

Abstract

Feature selection (FS) is an important data processing method in pattern recognition and data mining. Due to not considering characteristics of the FS problem itself, traditional particle update mechanisms and swarm initialization strategies adopted in most particle swarm optimization (PSO) limit their performance on dealing with high-dimensional FS problems. Focused on it, this paper proposes a novel feature selection algorithm based on bare bones PSO (BBPSO) with mutual information. Firstly, an effective swarm initialization strategy based on label correlation is developed, making full use of the correlation between features and class labels to accelerate the convergence of swarm. Then, in order to enhance the exploitation performance of the algorithm, two local search operators, i.e., the supplementary operator and the deletion operator, are developed based on feature relevance-redundancy. Furthermore, an adaptive flip mutation operator is designed to help particles jump out of local optimal solutions. We apply the proposed algorithm to typical datasets based on the K-Nearest Neighbor classifier (K-NN), and compare it with eleven state-of-the-art algorithms, SFS, PTA, SGA, BPSO, PSO(4-2), HPSO-LS, Binary BPSO, NaFA, IBFA, KPLS-mRMR and SMBA-CSFS. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a feature subset with better performance, and is a highly competitive FS algorithm.