Strong approximate Markov blanket and its application on filter-based feature selection

Abstract

In feature selection problems, strong relevant features may be misjudged as redundant by the approximate Markov blanket. To avoid this, a new concept called strong approximate Markov blanket is proposed. It is theoretically proved that no strong relevant feature will be misjudged as redundant by the proposed concept. To reduce computation time, we propose the concept of modified strong approximate Markov blanket, which still performs better than the approximate Markov blanket in avoiding misjudgment of strong relevant features. A new filter-based feature selection method that is applicable to high-dimensional datasets is further developed. It first groups features to remove redundant features, and then uses a sequential forward selection method to remove irrelevant features. Numerical results on four benchmark and seven real datasets suggest that it is a competitive feature selection method with high classification accuracy, moderate number of selected features, and above-average robustness.