Stability Of Feature Selection Techniques Research Articles

Enhancing data pipelines for forecasting student performance: integrating feature selection with cross-validation

Educators seek to harness knowledge from educational corpora to improve student performance outcomes. Although prior studies have compared the efficacy of data mining methods (DMMs) in pipelines for forecasting student success, less work has focused on identifying a set of relevant features prior to model development and quantifying the stability of feature selection techniques. Pinpointing a subset of pertinent features can (1) reduce the number of variables that need to be managed by stakeholders, (2) make “black-box” algorithms more interpretable, and (3) provide greater guidance for faculty to implement targeted interventions. To that end, we introduce a methodology integrating feature selection with cross-validation and rank each feature on subsets of the training corpus. This modified pipeline was applied to forecast the performance of 3225 students in a baccalaureate science course using a set of 57 features, four DMMs, and four filter feature selection techniques. Correlation Attribute Evaluation (CAE) and Fisher’s Scoring Algorithm (FSA) achieved significantly higher Area Under the Curve (AUC) values for logistic regression (LR) and elastic net regression (GLMNET), compared to when this pipeline step was omitted. Relief Attribute Evaluation (RAE) was highly unstable and produced models with the poorest prediction performance. Borda’s method identified grade point average, number of credits taken, and performance on concept inventory assessments as the primary factors impacting predictions of student performance. We discuss the benefits of this approach when developing data pipelines for predictive modeling in undergraduate settings that are more interpretable and actionable for faculty and stakeholders.

An experimental comparison of feature selection methods on two-class biomedical datasets

Feature selection is a significant part of many machine learning applications dealing with small-sample and high-dimensional data. Choosing the most important features is an essential step for knowledge discovery in many areas of biomedical informatics. The increased popularity of feature selection methods and their frequent utilisation raise challenging new questions about the interpretability and stability of feature selection techniques. In this study, we compared the behaviour of ten state-of-the-art filter methods for feature selection in terms of their stability, similarity, and influence on prediction performance. All of the experiments were conducted on eight two-class datasets from biomedical areas. While entropy-based feature selection appears to be the most stable, the feature selection techniques yielding the highest prediction performance are minimum redundance maximum relevance method and feature selection based on Bhattacharyya distance. In general, univariate feature selection techniques perform similarly to or even better than more complex multivariate feature selection techniques with high-dimensional datasets. However, with more complex and smaller datasets multivariate methods slightly outperform univariate techniques.