Firefly Optimization Algorithm for Feature Selection

Abstract

In this paper, a system for feature selection based on firefly algorithm (FFA) optimization is proposed. Data sets ordinarily includes a huge number of attributes, with irrelevant and redundant attributes. Redundant and irrelevant attributes might reduce the classification accuracy because of the large search space. The main goal of attribute reduction is to choose a subset of relevant attributes from a huge number of available attributes to obtain comparable or even better classification accuracy from using all attributes. A system for feature selection is proposed in this paper using a modified version of the firefly algorithm (FFA) optimization. The modified FFA algorithm adaptively balance the exploration and exploitation to quickly find the optimal solution. FFA is a new evolutionary computation technique, inspired by the flash lighting process of fireflies. The FFA can quickly search the feature space for optimal or near-optimal feature subset minimizing a given fitness function. The proposed fitness function used incorporate both classification accuracy and feature reduction size. The proposed system was tested on eighteen data sets and proves advance over other search methods as particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA) optimizers commonly used in this context using different evaluation indicators.