Feature Selection (FS) is an important process to find the minimal subset of features from the original data by removing the redundant and irrelevant features. It aims to improve the efficiency of classification algorithms. Rough set theory (RST) is one of the effective approaches to feature selection, but it uses complete search to search for all subsets of features and dependency to evaluate these subsets. However, the complete search is expensive and may not be feasible for large data due to its high cost. Therefore, meta-heuristics algorithms, especially Nature Inspired Algorithms, have been widely used to replace the reduction part in RST. This paper develops a new algorithm for Feature Selection based on hybrid Binary Cuckoo Search and rough set theory for classification on nominal datasets. The developed algorithm is evaluated on five nominal datasets from the UCI repository, against a number of similar NIAs algorithms. The results show that our algorithm achieves better FS compared to two known NIAs in a lesser number of iterations, without significantly reducing the classification accuracy.

Title

(International Journal of Information Technology and Computer Science(IJITCS

Publisher

MECS

Publisher Country

Palestine

Publication Type

Online only

Volume

9

Year

2017

Pages

63--72