Attribute Selection Techniques Research Articles

Predicting churn with filter-based techniques and deep learning

Customer churn prediction is of utmost importance in the telecommunications industry. Retaining customers through effective churn prevention strategies proves to be more cost-efficient. In this study, attribute selection analysis and deep learning are integrated to develop a customer churn prediction model to improve performance while reducing feature dimensions. The study includes the analysis of customer data attributes, exploratory data analysis, and data preprocessing for data quality enhancement. Next, significant features are selected using two attribute selection techniques, which are chi-square and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The selected features are fed into an artificial neural network (ANN) model for analysis and prediction. To enhance prediction performance and stability, a learning rate scheduler is deployed. Implementing the learning rate scheduler in the model can help prevent overfitting and enhance convergence speed. By dynamically adjusting the learning rate during the training process, the scheduler ensures that the model optimally adapts to the data while avoiding overfitting. The proposed model is evaluated using the Cell2Cell telecom database, and the results demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits a promising performance, showcasing its potential as an effective churn prediction solution in the telecommunications industry.

Evaluation of principal component analysis for seismic attribute selection and self-organizing maps for seismic facies discrimination in the presence of gas hydrates

Mapping the lateral distribution and thickness of gas hydrates and associated free gas using even the best quality seismic surveys can be quite challenging. As the stability of gas hydrates within the Gas Hydrate Stability Zone (GHSZ) is controlled by temperature and pressure, and because their impedance can be different than those of the sedimentary matrix in which they occur, we often are able to identify a bottom simulating reflector (BSR) at the base of the GHSZ cutting across stratigraphic reflectors. However, when the stratigraphic reflectors are parallel to the ocean bottom, the BSR is easily confounded with a strong stratigraphic reflector. Seismic attributes and machine learning (ML) applied to facies analysis have been successful in quantitatively mapping patterns in seismic data. However, selecting an optimal combination of seismic attributes and training data to perform a robust seismic facies classification is highly dependent on the interpreter's skills. In this study, we apply principal component analysis (PCA) to select a suite of seismic attributes to be used as input for self-organizing maps (SOM) to identify BSRs and surrounding facies in a seismic volume located in the Blake Ridge, offshore South Carolina, USA. As PCA is based on mathematically variability unrelated to geology, we evaluate PCA as an attribute selection technique under three different training data selection strategies, finding that combining seismic attributes such as total energy, coherence, GLCM entropy, and peak magnitude as input for SOM represents an effective method to detect BSRs. Additionally, we note that using a smaller subset of samples representing the target four seismic facies when applying PCA to select input attributes for SOM offers optimal BSRs identification.

CFS-MHA

With the increasing modernism in our society, networked computers are playing a pivotal role in dispersion of knowledge, and the protection of critical data in information systems has become a challenge for the research and industrial community. The intrusion detection systems undermine huge amounts of attack data to extrapolate patterns using machine learning techniques. In this paper, a two-stage intrusion detection model has been proposed to employ a blend of diverse attribute selection techniques and machine learning algorithms to provide high performance intrusion detection. The first stage extracts the relevant attributes by applying a hybrid meta-heuristic feature selection algorithm, and in the second stage, supervised machine learning algorithms have been implemented to improve the detection accuracy, execution time, and error rate. NSL-KDD dataset has been used, and the performance of CFS-MHA has been evaluated using different classification strategies. By using 10 attributes and random tree ensemble techniques, CFS-MHA has achieved an accuracy of 81.2% in detection of attacks.

Dynamic Security Assessment For Power System Using Attribute Selection Technique

The evaluation of the dynamic security of the electrical power system after the occurrence of disturbances in the network is one of the most important tools that the control center uses to maintain the system in a safe operating mode, as well as prevent cases of system out of control and cases of complete shutdown. With the annual increase in the size of the electrical system and its distribution over a very wide geographical area, this led to a new challenge to assess dynamic security assessment (DSA), which is dealing with a huge and varied amount of data that requires processing in a very short time. To address these challenges, this study presented a new technique of artificial intelligence, which is the attribute selection technique, to reduce the size of this data and thus improve the accuracy and speed of results. This method relied on the combination of decision tree algorithms and a technique (Attribute selection) in the data obtained from the test system (IEEE-30Bus). The results of this method showed a significant reduction in the number of data used, which amounted to (45.55%) of the total data, Which led to an improvement in the classification accuracy, as the classification accuracy reached (97.27%). This reduction is very important when dealing in the online operating environment, as it saves the time necessary to reach the most accurate evaluation decision and thus issue gives a greater opportunity to take the appropriate decision in the event of disturbances and keep the electrical system in a secure state.

A Genetic Algorithm with Flexible Fitness Function for Feature Selection in Educational Data: Comparative Evaluation

Educational Data Mining is an interdisciplinary field that helps understand educational phenomena through computational techniques. The databases of educational institutions are usually extensive, possessing many descriptive attributes that make the prediction process complex. In addition, the data can be sparse, redundant, irrelevant, and noisy, which can degrade the predictive quality of the models and affect computational performance. One way to simplify the problem is to identify the least important attributes and omit them from the modeling process. This can be performed by employing attribute selection techniques. This work evaluates different feature selection techniques applied to open educational data and paired alongside a genetic algorithm with a flexible fitness function. The methods and results described herein extend a previously published paper by: (i) describing a larger set of computational experiments; (ii) performing a hypothesis test over different classifiers; and (iii) presenting a more in-depth literature revision. The results obtained indicate an improvement in the classification process.

Construal Attacks on Wireless Data Storage Applications and Unraveling Using Machine Learning Algorithm

Cloud services are a popular concept used to describe how internet-based services are delivered and maintained. The computer technology environment is being restructured with respect to information preservation. Data protection is of critical importance when storing huge volumes of information. In today’s cyber world, an intrusion is a significant security problem. Services, information, and services are all vulnerable to attack in the cloud due to its distributed structure of the cloud. Inappropriate behavior in the connection and in the host is detected using intrusion detection systems (IDS) in the cloud. DDoS attacks are difficult to protect against since they produce massive volumes of harmful information on the network. This assault forces the cloud services to become unavailable to target consumers, which depletes computer resources and leaves the provider exposed to massive financial and reputational losses. Cyber-analyst data mining techniques may assist in intrusion detection. Machine learning techniques are used to create many strategies. Attribute selection techniques are also vital in keeping the dataset’s dimensionality low. In this study, one method is provided, and the dataset is taken from the NSL-KDD dataset. In the first strategy, a filtering method called learning vector quantization (LVQ) is used, and in the second strategy, a dimensionality-simplifying method called PCA. The selected attributes from each technique are used for categorization before being tested against a DoS attack. This recent study shows that an LVQ-based SVM performs better than the competition in detecting threats.

Detecting Malware Families and Subfamilies using Machine Learning Algorithms: An Empirical Study

Machine learning algorithms have proved their effectiveness in detecting malware. This paper conducts an em-pirical study to demonstrate the effectiveness of selected machine learning algorithms in detecting and classifying Android malware using permissions features. The used dataset consists of 9000 different malicious applications from the CIC-Maldroid2020, CIC-Maldroid2017 and CIC-InvesAndMal2019 datasets collected by the Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity. Meta-Multiclass and Random Forest ensemble classifiers are used based on different machine learning classifiers to overcome the imbalance in the data classes. Moreover, a genetic attribute selection technique and SMOTE are used to classify Ransomware sub-families to handle the small size of the dataset and underfitting problem. The results show that optimization and ensemble approaches are successful in treating dataset issues, with 95% accuracy in classifying big malware families and 80% in Ransomware subfamilies.

Impact of data pre-processing techniques on recurrent neural network performance in context of real-time drilling logs in an automated prediction framework

Recurrent neural networks (RNN), which are able to capture temporal natures of a signal, are becoming more common in machine learning applied to petroleum engineering, particularly drilling. With this technology come requirements and caveats related to the input data that play a significant role on resultant models. This paper explores how data pre-processing and attribute selection techniques affect the RNN models’ performance. Re-sampling and down-sampling methods are compared; imputation strategies, a problem generally omitted in published research, are explored and a method to select either last observation carried forward or linear interpolation is introduced and explored in terms of model accuracy. Case studies are performed on real-time drilling logs from the open Volve dataset published by Equinor. For a realistic evaluation, a semi-automated process is proposed for data preparation and model training and evaluation which employs a continuous learning approach for machine learning model updating, where the training dataset is being built continuously while the well is being made. This allows for accurate benchmarking of data pre-processing methods. Included is a previously developed and updated branched custom neural network architecture that includes both recurrent elements as well as row-wise regression elements. Source code for the implementation is published on GitHub.

Dynamic security assessment for the power system in the presence of wind turbines

Dynamic security is an essential requirement for operating a modern power system. Due to the global increase in load demand, modern power systems witness several dramatic changes in terms of size and implementation of new renewable sources. At the same time, the deregulation process in power operation policy is being pushed to operate closer to its security boundary limits. Based on the combined Decision Tree (DT) algorithm, namely Random Forest (RF) and advance attribute selection technique, this paper presents an approach to address these challenges related to dynamic security assessment (DSA) in the modern power system. The performance of study approach is demonstrated on a modified version of IEEE 9 and 14-bus test system models with presence of two wind turbines (WTs) type WTG 3. Results show the superiority of RF compared to other DT algorithms that are used in this study. In addition, the attribute selection technique could significantly affect the number of attributes required for DSA. This makes DT classifier more effectiveness in the online application. Thus, this approach can provide control center with vital information with high accuracy results and less attributes about security state direction that will help operator to take the right and fast steps to remedy problems and prevent a blackout from occurring.

Enhanced Random Forest Model for Robust Short-Term Photovoltaic Power Forecasting Using Weather Measurements

Short-term Photovoltaic (PV) Power Forecasting (STPF) is considered a topic of utmost importance in smart grids. The deployment of STPF techniques provides fast dispatching in the case of sudden variations due to stochastic weather conditions. This paper presents an efficient data-driven method based on enhanced Random Forest (RF) model. The proposed method employs an ensemble of attribute selection techniques to manage bias/variance optimization for STPF application and enhance the forecasting quality results. The overall architecture strategy gathers the relevant information to constitute a voted feature-weighting vector of weather inputs. The main emphasis in this paper is laid on the knowledge expertise obtained from weather measurements. The feature selection techniques are based on local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations, Extreme Boosting Model, and Elastic Net. A comparative performance investigation using an actual database, collected from the weather sensors, demonstrates the superiority of the proposed technique versus several data-driven machine learning models when applied to a typical distributed PV system.

Novel attribute selection technique for an efficient intrusion detection system

Novel attribute selection technique for an efficient intrusion detection system

Novel attribute selection technique for an efficient intrusion detection system

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is one of the popular countermeasures against network attacks or anomalies in the network. IDS requires data dimension reduction methods such as data filtering, attribute selection, and data clustering to improve the system's performance. Identifying the most significant attributes will produce the computational time complexity drastically. This paper proposes novel attribute selection methods for data reduction. The NSL-KDD dataset is selected for experimental evaluation. The attribute value ratios (AVRs) is calculated using average values with numeric attributes and frequency with binary attributes to select attributes. The proposed attributes selection model is also compared with the traditional attribute section method that is correlation-based feature selection (CFS), information gain (IG) and gain ratio (GR). Further, the accuracy (ACC), detection rate (DR) and false alarm rate (FAR) are computed using the proposed attributes selection model with J48Consolidated classifier and achieve better results than other state-of-the-art methodologies.

Machine learning approaches for sex estimation using cranial measurements.

The aim of the present study is to apply support vector machines (SVM) and artificial neural network (ANN) as sex classifiers and to generate useful classification models for sex estimation based on cranial measurements. Besides, the performance of the generated sub-symbolic machine learning models is compared with models developed through logistic regression (LR). The study was carried out on computed tomography images of 393 Bulgarian adults (169 males and 224 females). The three-dimensional coordinates of 47 landmarks were acquired and used for calculation of the cranial measurements. A total of 64 measurements (linear distances, angles, triangle areas and heights) and 22 indices were calculated. Two datasets were assembled including the linear measurements only and all measurements and index, respectively. An additional third dataset comprising all possible interlandmark distances between the landmarks was constructed. Two machine learning algorithms-SVM and ANN and a traditional statistical analysis LR-were applied to generate models for sex estimation. In addition, two advanced attribute selection techniques (Weka BestFirst and Weka GeneticSearch) were used. The classification accuracy of the models was evaluated by means of 10 × 10-fold cross-validation procedure. All three methods achieved accuracy results higher than 95%. The best accuracy (96.1 ± 0.5%) was obtained by SVM and it was statistically significantly higher than the best results achieved by ANN and LR. SVM and ANN reached higher accuracy by training on the full datasets than the selection datasets, except for the sample described by the interlandmark distances, where the reduction of attributes by the GeneticSearch algorithm improved the accuracy.

A Biomarker for Discriminating Between Migraine With and Without Aura: Machine Learning on Functional Connectivity on Resting-State EEGs

Advanced analyses of electroencephalography (EEG) are rapidly becoming an important tool in understanding the brain's processing of pain. To date, it appears that none have been explored as a way of distinguishing between migraine patients with aura (MWA) vs. those without aura (MWoA). In this work, we apply a mixture of predictive, e.g., classification methods and attribute-selection techniques, and traditional explanatory, e.g., statistical, analyses on functional connectivity measures extracted from EEG signal acquired from at-rest participants (N = 52) during their interictal period and tested them against the distinction between MWA and MWoA. We show that a functional connectivity metric of EEG data obtained during resting state can serve as a sole biomarker to differentiate between MWA and MWoA. Using the proposed analysis, we not only have been able to present high classification results (average classification of 84.62%) but also to discuss the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms upon which our technique is based. Additionally, a more traditional statistical analysis on the selected features reveals that MWoA patients show higher than average connectivity in the Theta band (p = 0.03) at rest than MWAs. We propose that our data-driven analysis pipeline can be used for resting-EEG analysis in any clinical context.

Variance Ranking Attributes Selection Techniques for Binary Classification Problem in Imbalance Data

Data are being generated and used to support all aspects of healthcare provision, from policy formation to the delivery of primary care services. Particularly, with the change of emphasis from curative to preventive medicine, the importance of data-based research such as data mining and machine learning has emphasized the issues of class distributions in datasets. In typical predictive modeling, the inability to effectively address a class imbalance in a real-life dataset is an important shortcoming of the existing machine learning algorithms. Most algorithms assume a balanced class in their design, resulting in poor performance in predicting the minority target class. Ironically, the minority target class is usually the focus in predicting processes. The misclassification of the minority target class has resulted in serious consequences in detecting chronic diseases and detecting fraud and intrusion where positive cases are erroneously predicted as not positive. This paper presents a new attribute selection technique called variance ranking for handling imbalance class problems in a dataset. The results obtained were compared to two well-known attribute selection techniques: the Pearson correlation and information gain technique. This paper uses a novel similarity measurement technique ranked order similarity-ROS to evaluate the variance ranking attribute selection compared to the Pearson correlations and information gain. Further validation was carried out using three binary classifications: logistic regression, support vector machine, and decision tree. The proposed variance ranking and ranked order similarity techniques showed better results than the benchmarks. The ROS technique provided an excellent means of grading and measuring the similarities where other similarity measurement techniques were inadequate or not applicable.

Function words in statistical machine-translated Chinese and original Chinese: A study into the translationese of machine translation systems

Abstract Statistical approaches have become the mainstream in machine translation (MT), for their potential in producing less rigid and more natural translations than rule-based approaches. However, on closer examination, the uses of function words between statistical machine-translated Chinese and the original Chinese are different, and such differences may be associated with translationese as discussed in translation studies. This article examines the distribution of Chinese function words in a comparable corpus consisting of MTs and the original Chinese texts extracted from Wikipedia. An attribute selection technique is used to investigate which types of function words are significant in discriminating between statistical machine-translated Chinese and the original texts. The results show that statistical MT overuses the most frequent function words, even when alternatives exist. To improve the quality of the end product, developers of MT should pay close attention to modelling Chinese conjunctions and adverbial function words. The results also suggest that machine-translated Chinese shares some characteristics with human-translated texts, including normalization and being influenced by the source language; however, machine-translated texts do not exhibit other characteristics of translationese such as explicitation.

An Improved and Adaptive Attribute Selection Technique to Optimize Dengue Fever Prediction

Clinical information mining is rapidly gaining popularity. Restorative information are high dimensional in nature which contains unessential elements that diminish prediction capability. Hence Attribute Optimization is required to retain only the essential features while eradicating irrelevant features. Dengue is one of the major worldwide medical related disease. It has affected millions of people throughout world while a majority of them being women. With constant upgradation of information technology and its application in healthcare domain, several cases relating to diabetes along with its symptoms are properly documented. Our study is centered on developing and implementing a new Adaptive and Dynamic Attribute Optimization algorithm to determine whether patients suffer from Dengue. Our algorithm is evaluated against some vital performance metrics and compared with other sub-modules of the proposed algorithm and traditional Genetic Algorithm. The results indicate our algorithm is more efficient and accurate in determining presence of Dengue disease. This may assist the medical experts in effective diagnosis of patients suffering from Dengue.

A clustering-based feature selection method for automatically generated relational attributes

Although data mining problems require a flat mining table as input, in many real-world applications analysts are interested in finding patterns in a relational database. To this end, new methods and software have been recently developed that automatically add attributes (or features) to a target table of a relational database which summarize information from all other tables. When attributes are automatically constructed by these methods, selecting the important attributes is particularly difficult, because a large number of the attributes are highly correlated. In this setting, attribute selection techniques such as the Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (lasso), elastic net, and other machine learning methods tend to under-perform. In this paper, we introduce a novel attribute selection procedure, where after an initial screening step, we cluster the attributes into different groups and apply the group lasso to select both the true attributes groups and then the true attributes. The procedure is particularly suited to high dimensional data sets where the attributes are highly correlated. We test our procedure on several simulated data sets and a real-world data set from a marketing database. The results show that our proposed procedure obtains a higher predictive performance while selecting a much smaller set of attributes when compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

An Approach to Detect Credit Card Frauds using Attribute Selection and Ensemble Techniques

An Approach to Detect Credit Card Frauds using Attribute Selection and Ensemble Techniques

Tolerance-based intuitionistic fuzzy-rough set approach for attribute reduction

Due to technological advancement and the explosive growth of electrically stored information, automated methods are required to aid users in maintaining and processing this huge amount of information. Experts, as well as machine learning processes on large volumes of data, are the main sources of knowledge. Knowledge extraction is an important step in framing expert and intelligent systems. However, the knowledge extraction phase is very slow or even impossible due to noise and large size of data. To enhance the productivity of machine learning algorithms, feature selection or attribute reduction plays a key role in the selection of relevant and non-redundant features to improve the performance of classifiers and interpretability of data. Many areas like machine learning, image processing, data mining, natural language processing and Bioinformatics, etc., which have high relevancy to expert and intelligent systems, are applications of feature selection.Rough set theory has been successfully applied for attribute reduction, but this theory is inadequate in the case of attribute reduction of real-valued data set as it may lose some information during the discretization process. Fuzzy and rough set theories have been combined and various attribute selection techniques were proposed, which can easily handle the real-valued data. An intuitionistic fuzzy set possesses a strong ability to represent information and better describing the uncertainty when compared to the classical fuzzy set theory as it considers positive, negative and hesitancy degree simultaneously for an object to belong to a set. This paper proposes a novel mechanism of attribute selection using tolerance-based intuitionistic fuzzy rough set theory. For this, we present tolerance-based intuitionistic fuzzy lower and upper approximations and formulate a degree of dependency of decision features over the set of conditional features. Moreover, the basic results on lower and upper approximations based on rough sets are extended for intuitionistic fuzzy rough sets and analogous results are established. In the end, the proposed algorithm is applied to an example data set and the comparison between tolerance-based fuzzy rough and intuitionistic fuzzy rough sets approaches for feature selection is presented. The proposed concept is found to be better performing in the form of selected attributes.