Granule-specific feature selection for continuous data classification using neighborhood rough sets

Abstract

Neighborhood rough set theories are commonly used in global feature selection to achieve high performance in continuous data classification. However, selecting a single feature subset to represent the entire dataset may degrade the performance when there are intra-class dissimilarities among objects. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel feature-selection method, Granule-specific Feature Selection (GFS) to select local feature subsets for continuous data classification. The feature selection approach constitutes a novel feature selection algorithm and a novel feature evaluation function and uses existing approaches for granule identification and classification with some adjustments. The neighborhood rough set theories are used in granule (subclass) identification within each class when there are no subclass label information available in the training data, while an improved k-Nearest Neighbors approach is used in classification with granule-specific feature subsets. Experimental results show GFS outperforms most of the global, class-specific, and local feature selection baselines in terms of classification performance.