Performance Analysis of Particle Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection

Abstract

One of the key task in data mining is the selection of relevant features from datasets with high dimensionality. This is expected to reduce the time and space complexity, and consequently improve the performance of data mining algorithms for tasks such as classification. This study presents an empirical study of the effect of particle swarm optimization as a feature selection technique on the performance of classification algorithms. Two dataset from different domains were used: SMS spam detection and sentiment analysis datasets. Particle swarm optimization is applied on the datasets for feature selection. Both the reduced and raw dataset are separately classified using C4.5 decision tree, k-nearest neighbour and support vector machine. The result of the analysis showed that the improvement of classifier performance is case-dependent; some significant improvements are noticed in the sentiment analysis datasets and not in the SMS spam dataset. Although some marginal effect are observed on performance, it implies that with particle swarm optimization features selection the space complexity is reduced while maintaining the accuracy of the classifiers. Keywords—classification, feature selection, machine learning, particle swarm optimization, text mining