Research on Improvements of Feature Selection Using Forest Optimization Algorithm

In classification, feature selection has been an important, but difficult problem. Recent research results disclosed that feature selection using forest optimization algorithm (FSFOA) has a better classification performance and good dimensionality reduction ability. However, the randomness of initialization phase, the limitations of updating mechanism and the inferior quality of the new tree in the local seeding stage severely limit the classification performance and dimensionality reduction ability of the algorithm. In this paper, a new initialization strategy and updating mechanism are used and a greedy strategy is added in the local seeding stage to form a new feature selection algorithm (IFSFOA) in order to maximize the classification performance and simultaneously minimize the number of features. In experiment, IFSFOA uses SVM, J48 and KNN classifiers to guide the learning process while utilizing the machine learning database UCI for testing. The results show that compared with FSFOA, IFSFOA has a significant improvement in classification performance and dimensionality reduction. Comparing IFSFOA algorithm with more efficient feature selection methods proposed in recent years, IFSFOA is still very competitive in both accuracy and dimensionality reduction. © Copyright 2018, Institute of Software, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.