Recursive Feature Elimination with Ensemble Learning Using SOM Variants

To uncover an appropriate latent subspace for data representation, we propose in this paper a new extension of the random forests method which leads to the unsupervised feature selection called Feature Selection with Random Forests (RFS) based on SOM variants that evaluates the out-of-bag feature importance from a set of partitions. Every partition is created using a several bootstrap samples and a random features subset. We obtain empirical results on 19 benchmark datasets specifying that RFS, boosted with a recursive feature elimination (RFE) method, can lead to important enhancement in terms of clustering accuracy with a very restricted subset of features. Simulations are performed on nine different benchmarks, including face data, handwritten digit data, and document data. Promising experimental results and theoretical analysis prove the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method for feature selection in comparison with competitive representative algorithms. © 2017 World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd.